Translucent Composite ⚡🅡🅞🅣🅘

A plain masked composite gives you a hard cutout: the mask is either "show foreground" or "show background," full stop. That's fine for a lot of jobs and useless for the stuff that's actually translucent - fire, smoke, magic auras, glass, holograms - where the whole point is that some parts let the background through and some don't, gradually, based on what's actually there. TranslucentComposite is built specifically for that case, and it pairs naturally with the rest of RyanOnTheInside's pack: render a fire or smoke effect out of the particle system as a mask+image pair, then use this node to actually lay it into a real photo or video frame so it reads as in the scene rather than stuck on top of it.

How it works

It takes the usual background, foreground, and mask, but adds real blend-mode math and a smarter transparency model on top. blend_mode gives you four real Photoshop-style modes - normal for a standard cutout, screen to brighten (good for glows and reflections), multiply to darken (good for shadows and dark glass), overlay to punch contrast while keeping highlights and shadows intact. preserve_transparency (on by default) is the more interesting piece: instead of relying purely on your mask for where things are see-through, it reads the foreground's own luminance - bright pixels of your foreground stay more opaque, dark pixels get more transparent - which is a lot closer to how actual light, fire, and glass behave than a flat cutout mask ever gets you. background_influence then blends a bit of the background's own color back into the result (default 0.3), so the composite doesn't look chemically isolated from the scene it's sitting in. luminance_boost lets you brighten or dim the foreground before any of that math runs.

The inputs and outputs that matter

opacity (0–1, default 1) is your overall strength dial - turn the whole effect up or down. luminance_boost (-1 to 1, default 0) is worth reaching for specifically when a glow effect is technically correct but reads too dim or too blown out - nudge it before you fight the effect's own source render. background_influence (0–1, default 0.3) is a separate knob from opacity, and it's easy to grab the wrong one: opacity controls how strong the whole effect is, background_influence only controls how much backdrop color bleeds through it. The single output is IMAGE - the finished composite.

How to install it

Via ComfyUI Manager, search "RyanOnTheInside." Manually:

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

Restart ComfyUI. No model downloads for this node - it's pure image math, part of what the pack pulls in via OpenCV/Pillow/scikit-image generally.

Common issues & troubleshooting

If your composite looks flat and pasted-on despite preserve_transparency being on, check how bright your foreground actually is overall - a foreground that's already blown-out bright everywhere gives the luminance-based transparency nothing to work with, so it reads as fully opaque no matter what your mask says. Either turn preserve_transparency off and lean on the mask alone, or push luminance_boost negative to give the effect some genuinely dark, transparent regions to work with.

If the composite looks strong or weak overall, that's opacity. If it looks right in strength but color-isolated from the scene - like it was rendered separately and stamped on - that's background_influence, and it's usually under-used at the default 0.3 for effects that need to feel truly embedded in a photo.