🎨 Sample Image Area as Palette

Sample Image as Palette is great until you realize you don't want the whole image - you want the colors of the sky, or just the grass, or only that neon sign. Sample Image Area as Palette [Dream] is the surgical version. It splits your image into a 3×3 grid and randomly samples pixels from exactly one cell of it - top-left, top-center, all the way to bottom-right - producing a palette that represents one region, not the whole frame. It's the node that makes the pack's area-sampled-noise workflow possible: sample the sky region of your reference frame into a palette, sample the ground region into another, and drive region-specific noise or color from each.

The mechanism is the same honest random-sampling as its sibling - no clustering, just samples random pixels from within the chosen rectangle - with one structural difference: the image is divided into nine equal rectangles and you pick which one gets sampled. Default samples is 256, a quarter of the whole-image node's default, which is sensible because you're drawing from a smaller area. Seeded, so the same image, area, and seed always give you the same palette.

The inputs that matter

• image - any ComfyUI IMAGE.
• area - one of nine positions: top-left, top-center, top-right, center-left, center, center-right, bottom-left, bottom-center, bottom-right. This is the whole point of the node.
• samples - 1 to 4096, default 256. Fewer = lighter and more seed-sensitive; more = more faithful to the region.
• seed - reproducibility.

Output is a single palette (RGB_PALETTE). Wire it into Noise from Area Palettes (slot it into the matching region input), Noise from Palette, or Palette Color Align.

Installing it

Ships with Dream Project Animation Nodes - ComfyUI Manager (search "Dream Project Animation Nodes") or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/alt-key-project/comfyui-dream-project.git
cd comfyui-dream-project
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI. Watch the numpy<2.0 pin if pip touches your environment.

Common issues

The main trap is forgetting the grid is exactly three by three with equal cells - you can't nudge the region, only pick the cell. If your sky bleeds into the top-center cell boundary, sample both top cells and let area blending sort it out. Also, one palette per batch image: if your input is a batch of frames, you get a palette per frame, which is powerful but means your palette count grows with the batch. And the pack-wide honesty note: the README declares the pack unmaintained, but this sampler is stable and runs fine on current ComfyUI.