3-Panel Moodboard

Moodboards are the workhorse of character and style consistency: three reference frames side by side, and suddenly "keep this look" means something concrete. The 3-Panel Moodboard node is StudioDeep's answer, and it's delightfully boring - no API calls, no keys, no models. It takes three images and lays them out as three equal panels on a 16:9 canvas. That's it. That's the whole node, and it's genuinely useful.

How it works

The layout is what separates this from a naive "just paste them side by side" hack. Each panel is center-cropped to the exact panel aspect ratio before it's resized - so a portrait phone photo and a wide film frame both end up filling their third cleanly, with no distortion and no letterboxing. The three panels go edge-to-edge with a thin gap between them (~16px at 1K, scaled up at higher resolutions) on your choice of black, white, or gray background. Everything runs locally through PIL and torch, which ComfyUI already ships - zero new dependencies.

Inputs and output

• image_1, image_2, image_3 - any three IMAGE inputs. The first frame of each is used, so a single frame per wire is what you want. Order matters: the layout is left-to-right, 1-2-3.
• resolution - 1K (1920×1080), 2K (2560×1440), or 4K (3840×2160). The panels scale with it. 2K is the sweet spot for a moodboard that's sharp on a 1440p monitor without making every downstream upscale cost more.
• background - Black, White, or Gray for the (mostly invisible) seams and any margin color.

Output: a single moodboard (IMAGE) at the chosen resolution. Wire it to a preview node, a save node, or use it as a reference input for consistency-driven workflows.

Installing

Same as every StudioDeep node - ComfyUI Manager, search "StudioDeep", install, restart. Or manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/studiodeep-ai/comfyui-studiodeep StudioDeep
pip install -r StudioDeep/requirements.txt

No downloads, no keys, nothing to configure. This is the rare ComfyUI node you can use instantly.

Troubleshooting

• Images look stretched - they shouldn't; the node center-crops to aspect first. If something looks off, check that your inputs aren't already weird aspect ratios (an extreme panorama gets aggressively cropped to fit a third of 16:9 - that's the crop working as designed).
• Unexpected colors on the edges - for images that don't match the panel aspect, the crop eats the edges rather than padding them. If you're seeing background color, it's from a rare rounding case at very wide resolutions, and the fix is using images closer to 16:9 per panel.
• It's an output-friendly node but not an output node in the ComfyUI sense - pair it with a SaveImage or preview to actually see the result.

Where people reach for it: after Story Panel gives you three matching shot prompts, generate the three frames and composite them into one reference sheet for the next character-consistency pass. That workflow - reference → panels → moodboard → regenerate - is the whole loop this pack is designed around.