Stability Creative Upscale

Creative Upscale is the other half of Stability's upscaling pair, and it does the job its name implies: it creates. Where Conservative Upscale adds pixels and keeps faith with the source, this node invents plausible detail - fabric weave, pores, texture that was never actually in the image. That's the SUPIR/SeedVR2/Magnific category of upscaling, and this is Stability's hosted version of it.

Which is exactly the warning label: any generative upscaler rewrites the image it touches, and it rewrites faces most of all. The standing community advice in the upscaling world applies here verbatim - if you care about recognizing a person in the output, keep faces out of the creative pass and inpaint them back in separately. This node will happily replace a face with a plausible one.

It's a cloud node from the official "Stability API nodes for ComfyUI" pack, hitting stable-image/upscale/creative. Zero VRAM, credits per call, Stability key required. Locally you'd reach for SeedVR2 or SUPIR - heavier, slower, but free and arguably better-tuned. The honest case for this node: no local GPU, or you want the cloud's "creative upscale" look without running a 10GB model.

How it works

Like Conservative, it wants a prompt - and like Conservative, the prompt should describe the source image rather than a fantasy. The difference is in the range and the intent:

• creativity (0.0–0.35, default 0.3) - how aggressively it invents detail. The range is narrow because creative upscaling is a runaway; even at 0.3 it's adding texture. This is the main dial you'll touch.
• prompt / negative_prompt - describe what's in the image so the model adds the right kind of detail. A good negative ("blurry, oversharpened, plastic") keeps it from cooking the output.
• seed - for keeping a good result reproducible.
• style / style_preset - same as the rest of the pack: preset ignored unless style is on.

One thing that surprises people: this route is async. The node submits the job, then polls Stability's results endpoint for up to four minutes, sleeping between checks. So a Creative Upscale run can feel slow - it's genuinely a background job, not a quick pass. Plan around a wait, or run it as an end-of-workflow step.

Output is a single IMAGE tensor.

Installing it

From the "Stability API nodes for ComfyUI" pack - ComfyUI Manager, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Stability-AI/ComfyUI-SAI_API
# restart ComfyUI

No models download; requests aside, nothing beyond ComfyUI's stack. Key via SAI_API_KEY, a sai_platform_key.txt file, or per-node api_key_override (which embeds the key in the workflow - don't share those).

Common issues

• Faces you don't recognize - expected, not a bug. Keep faces out of the creative pass.
• The node just sits there - it's polling. Up to ~240 seconds for big jobs; that's the async design, not a hang.
• "payment_required" - credits ran out; a creative upscale is a heavier job than the fast or conservative routes, so budget accordingly.
• Output looks overcooked - lower creativity toward 0.2 and strengthen the negative prompt.

Creative upscaling is a "when you know what you're buying" tool: detail, at the cost of fidelity. This node sells that honestly - just don't point it at anyone you need to keep recognizable.