Skin Luminance Adjust (Eric_)

Brightening a face sounds easy until you do it and the subject looks like a clown: skin lifted in a flat additive way goes milky, saturation gets weird, and shadows turn into a "painted on" mess. Skin Luminance Adjust (Eric_) is built to avoid exactly that. It changes only the luminance of skin pixels - never hue, and it compensates saturation as it goes - using the same perceptual math (L* space) a colorist uses, so a lift in the shadows and a lift in the highlights look like the same intentional brightening instead of two different hacks.

Two modes, pick your poison.

• target_ire - you set the target mean skin luminance in IRE (default 70, which is the broadcast standard for skin tone). The node measures the current mean, computes a multiplicative gain to hit your target, and applies it in L* so it reads as uniform across shadow and highlight. This is the "make it look like a properly-exposed broadcast face" mode.
• manual_offset - the default. A direct Y offset (manual_offset, -1 to +1): +0.1 lifts skin by about 0.1 Y units (~10 IRE), -0.3 darkens by 0.3. Simple and predictable.

The other knobs. detection_mode works exactly like its sibling in SkinToneCorrector: combined (mask + confidence exclusion holes), hsv_auto (no mask), or mask_only (default here - just your feathered mask). skin_threshold (default 0.1) in combined mode drops the bottom fraction of skin-likeness inside the mask - raise it toward 0.2–0.25 to also exclude lips. feather softens the boundary. And strength (0–1, default 0.5) scales the whole shift - this is the dial to turn if the result looks too aggressive.

There's a nice hidden behavior worth knowing: the node attenuates the correction automatically when darkening, precisely so you don't get that dead "painted" look. It also applies a saturation rolloff - brightening slightly desaturates, darkening slightly saturates - which keeps skin looking like skin rather than plastic.

Where it goes. It's the third step in the pack's recommended chain: ColorCastRemover → SkinToneCorrector → SkinLuminanceAdjust. Fix white balance, then hue, then brightness - in that order, or the luminance pass will fight a cast you haven't removed yet. Output is just the corrected image; run the analyzer afterward and watch skin_ire approach 70.

Installing it. It's in the Eric Color Correction pack:

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

Restart ComfyUI (or ComfyUI Manager → "Eric Color Correction"). Pure tensor math, no model downloads, CPU-friendly. Same license reminder as the rest of the pack: non-commercial CC BY-NC-style by default, paid commercial license required for work you sell.

One honest note: this node has more moving parts than the rest of the pack - two modes, three detection modes, threshold, feather, strength - and the defaults (manual_offset, mask_only) are conservative on purpose. If you're a beginner, set a skin mask, leave manual_offset at 0 and strength at 0.5, and nudge the offset a tenth at a time. It's a scalpel, and it rewards small movements.