RC Shine/Oil Removal

Every portrait shooter has a horror story about a subject's forehead catching the light like a freshly waxed car. In photography you fix it with a powder puff; in ComfyUI, you reach for RC Shine/Oil Removal. This is a specialized retouching node built on the same frequency-separation foundation as the pack's skin smoothing, but pointed at one specific problem: specular shine on skin - foreheads, noses, chins - where the reflection blows out texture and washes out color.

The reason this is worth a dedicated node rather than a generic blur is that shine isn't just bright; it's also textured (the glare kills the detail) and desaturated (the highlight wipes out the local color). Fix it with a plain soft brush and you get a gray smudge. This node handles all three problems and hands you the mask it used.

How it works

The pipeline is: detect the shine areas (brightness above a threshold), soften them by reducing high-frequency detail and smoothing the low-frequency layer, then boost saturation back into the affected regions so they don't come out flat. It's frequency separation with a target - the same split-the-image trick, but applied selectively where the highlights are.

Key controls:

• shine_detection_threshold - brightness threshold for what counts as shine. Default 0.55; the tooltip suggests 0.5–0.6 for portraits. Lower = more sensitive.
• shine_removal_strength - overall effect strength, 0–1.
• high_frequency_reduction / low_frequency_smoothing - how hard to kill texture glare vs. smooth tone in the shine areas.
• saturation_boost - restores the color the highlight washed out. Default 1.5; the 1.5–2.0 range is the sweet spot.
• brightness_reduction - dims the shine. 0.1 default is gentle; 0.3+ starts to look sculpted.
• smoothing_radius / feather_edges - the blur radius and how softly the mask edges blend, so you don't get a hard "I edited this zone" boundary.
• skin_tone_detection - restrict processing to skin tones. Default off (the tooltip's blunt advice: turn it ON for portraits, OFF if it looks like nothing happened).
• invert_mask - defaults to true, meaning bright = protect, dark = process. The optional protection_mask input lets you paint your own.
• protection_strength - how hard the protection mask guards its areas.

Outputs: the processed image and the shine_mask it computed - worth wiring to a preview to see exactly what it thinks is shiny.

How to install it

Part of the RC Image Compositor pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/kj863257/ComfyUI_RC_Image_Compositor
cd ComfyUI_RC_Image_Compositor
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI, or install via ComfyUI Manager (search "RC Image Compositor"). Deps: pillow, numpy, opencv-python.

Common issues

The most common failure is the node "doing nothing" - which almost always means the threshold is too high for your image's highlights, or skin_tone_detection is on and the skin detection is failing on your lighting. The debug move is to preview the shine_mask output: if it's black, nothing was detected and you should lower the threshold; if it's covering the whole face, raise it.

Second, don't stack this with the pack's skin smoothing at full strength. Both work by blurring; run shine removal first, then smooth - and keep the smoothing gentle, or you'll flatten the very texture the shine removal just restored.

And a tip: the saturation_boost exists because desaturated shine is the giveaway of a bad edit. If your result looks "cleaned" but lifeless, push that slider before you touch anything else.