SMC Affine Recombine

SMC Affine Recombine (class SMCAffineRecombine) is the inverse of SMC Affine Low / High Split. It takes a low layer and a high layer, sums them with image = low + high * high_strength, and hands you back a full image. The high_strength multiplier (0–4, default 1.0) is the whole point: it's a volume knob on the high-frequency detail.

Use it the way you'd use any split-and-rebuild frequency pipeline: split an image, fix whatever's wrong in the low layer (washout, flat lighting, color cast), optionally scale the high layer, and rebuild. At high_strength = 1.0 you get back what you split. Crank it above 1 and detail gets crisper (at the risk of ringing and noise); drop it below 1 and you're softening the image by removing detail without the plastic look of plain blur.

Inputs

• low - the blurred layer from SMC Affine Low / High Split (or any image).
• high - the raw residual from the split. The node auto-resizes it to match low, so slightly mismatched sizes won't crash.
• high_strength (0–4, default 1.0) - the detail multiplier.
• mask (optional) - if given, the recombination only applies inside the mask.
• base_image (optional) - what the masked-out area shows instead of low. Leave it empty and the masked-out area falls back to low.

Output

One IMAGE, clamped to 0–1.

Where it fits

In the pack's overall story, the affine path is the diagnostic/explicit route, and this node is its finishing utility - it's how you apply a corrected low-frequency layer while keeping or boosting the detail that a compand pass might otherwise soften. It's also just a genuinely handy general-purpose detail-boost node that happens to live in this pack: split, recombine at 1.15, and see if the eyes/lashes/edges get sharper without the plastic look of sharpening filters.

Install & gotchas

Same pack, trivial install:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/xmarre/ComfyUI-StableManifoldCompander

or ComfyUI Manager (search "Stable Manifold Compander"). No extra dependencies. One honest gotcha: because the high layer is the raw residual, an unmodified recombine at 1.0 is effectively lossless, but pushing high_strength too high will amplify whatever noise was in the image. Start at 1.0 and step up by 0.05 - this is a node where "a little" is a lot.