VHS Degrade

VHS Degrade is the one-stop shop for making an image look like it spent thirty years in a drawer. From TrophiHunter's Photography Nodes pack, it bundles six separate forms of tape damage into a single node, each with its own strength slider. You turn on the ones you want, leave the rest at zero, and get that analog-horror / found-footage / "we recorded over your wedding" look without stitching together half a dozen nodes.

The six sliders

Each parameter scales one specific artifact, straight from the author's own descriptions:

• chroma_shift - the classic VHS chroma smear: color channels sliding sideways out of register with the luma. The one that makes reds bleed.
• jitter - vertical waves, the rolling/tracking distortion that makes a frame wobble like the tracking is off.
• head_noise - pixel noise at the bottom of the image, where the tape head reads the edge of the frame. Fittingly, it's a dice roll in the code - it only shows up most of the time.
• scanlines - the horizontal line pattern that reads as "TV screen." Higher is more obvious.
• dropouts - horizontal strips of color noise, the moment of static where the tape degrades.
• blur - softens the whole result, gluing all the damage together like an old low-pass filter on the tape.

All six default to 1, and there's a blur cap at 2 while the others go higher - that should tell you the intended vibe is "slightly worn," not "signal lost."

The thing you need to know before you use it

This node is random every run. It drives off Python's random module - the chroma shift direction, the jitter phase, the head noise, the dropout positions are all re-rolled each time you execute. For a batch of video frames that's actually a feature: each frame degrades slightly differently, which is exactly how real tape looks. For a still you want to reproduce, it's a trap - you can't seed it, so rerunning gives you a different take. My advice: for stills, run it a few times and keep the good one. For video, run the batch once and let the randomness be the point.

Installing it

Part of the Photography Nodes pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/TrophiHunter/ComfyUI_Photography_Nodes
# restart, then find it under TrophiHunter/Photography

Or ComfyUI Manager → search "Photography Nodes" by TrophiHunter. No models, no requirements.txt - just torch and torchvision.

Troubleshooting

If the output looks like TV static, you've left too many effects at their defaults - set everything to 0, then turn on one or two at the strength you actually want. If the image looks sharp and digital under the scanlines, that's what blur is for; a small bump sells the whole thing. And the natural pairing: this gives you the damage, while the pack's NTSC Filter gives you the color/banding of a broadcast signal. Stack them and you've basically built a VHS machine.