SkinRetouching PM

SkinRetouching PM is the shortest node in this pack: one image in, one image out, and no knobs at all. It runs a single skin-retouching model over whatever you feed it and hands back a "cleaned up" portrait. If you've ever used the retouch pass in EasyPhoto, this is that exact step, extracted as a node.

Under the hood it's another ModelScope pipeline - damo/cv_unet_skin_retouching_torch, a UNet that smooths skin while trying to leave eyes, teeth, and hair alone. There's no diffusion, no prompt, no strength slider. It's a deterministic forward pass, which is both the appeal and the limitation: consistent, fast, and completely unconfigurable.

The input list is literally image, and the output is an IMAGE. That's it. In the stock workflow it sits between generation and PortraitEnhancement - clean the skin, then upscale/sharpening on top - and the chain works well because the retouch tends to soften away some artifacts that the enhancement pass then restores detail to.

Here's the part worth actually thinking about, and it comes straight from the KB's photorealism essay: too-smooth skin is the single most common tell that an image is AI-generated. "Beauty filter" skin with no pores and no micro-texture is the giveaway everyone spots. This node leans into that direction - it smooths skin on purpose. So treat it as a deliberate look, not a default polish step, and definitely not something to run over every portrait you make. For a subtle result you have two practical options since there's no intensity control: run it and blend the output back toward the original with RatioMerge2Image, or mask the result so only the face region takes the retouch. Otherwise you'll get that glossy skincare-ad skin that reads as fake at full resolution.

Install is the pack story you've probably already read elsewhere: Manager or git clone https://github.com/THtianhao/ComfyUI-Portrait-Maker into custom_nodes, restart, and don't interrupt the first-startup model download (several GB, no hash verification, partial files must be deleted and re-downloaded). The retouching model itself is lazy-loaded from ModelScope on the first run of this node, so that first execution will stall for a while, then be instant afterward. The pack's requirements are on the heavy side - tensorflow, onnxruntime, modelscope, insightface, a pinned diffusers==0.18.2 - and there's a known Windows dependency wrinkle the author notes as "currently resolving," so if the install grumbles, that's it.

Realistic expectations: this is a retouch, not a repair. It won't fix a botched jawline or give you detail that was never generated - it smooths what's there. If your issue is a misshapen face rather than bumpy skin, you want FaceShapMatch or a regenerate, not this node. For the one thing it does - instantly flattening skin texture on an otherwise good portrait - it's genuinely handy, as long as you remember that "otherwise good" is doing the heavy lifting.