VRGDG Image Paste Back (Feathered)

VRGDG Image Paste Back (Feathered) solves the classic "I upscaled/enhanced a crop and now it looks like a sticker" problem. You take a face or region out of an image, enhance it (Z-Image upscale, face repair, whatever), and when you paste it back the edges scream "edited". This node pastes the enhanced crop back into the original using the exact crop geometry from WAS Image Suite's face crop - it consumes CROP_DATA, the same metadata WAS nodes produce - and then blends the edge with padding, feathering, and a color match so the seam disappears.

The mechanical trick is that it doesn't just feather the boundary of the crop as-is. It uses inset_padding to shrink the opaque region inward from the crop edge, then feathers that inner boundary across feather_strength pixels. The result: the enhanced interior stays fully intact where it matters, and the transition zone sits well inside the crop where the original and enhanced images are most similar, which makes the blend far harder to spot.

The inputs

• original_image - the untouched source.
• enhanced_crop - the processed version of the crop you're pasting back.
• crop_data - the CROP_DATA from a WAS Image Suite face-crop node. This is what tells the node where the crop lived and how it was transformed. Without it, no paste.
• inset_padding - how far the opaque blend region sits inside the crop edge (default 8, up to 1024).
• feather_strength - the width of the feathered transition (default 24).
• blend_shape - ellipse or rectangle. Ellipse is the default and usually the safer look for faces; rectangle for rectangular regions.
• color_match - how strongly the pasted crop's color is nudged toward the original at the blend (default 0.65). Handles the classic VAE-enhance color shift that makes pasted regions look bleached.

Optional mask - if you have a precise region mask, supply it to constrain where the paste applies.

The outputs

• image - the composited result.
• blend_mask - the mask of what was actually pasted, so you can inspect or reuse the blend region.

Installing it

It's part of the VRGameDevGirl pack (Manager → search vrgamedev, or git clone https://github.com/vrgamegirl19/comfyui-vrgamedevgirl.git into custom_nodes/), restart, hard-refresh. But note the dependency: it expects WAS Node Suite to be installed too, because that's where CROP_DATA comes from. If you don't have WAS, install it via Manager or you won't have anything producing the crop metadata.

Common issues

• No CROP_DATA to connect. You need a WAS Image Crop Face node in the graph before this one. The pack's Face Fix workflow shows the intended pairing.
• Visible seam anyway. The usual causes, in order: color_match too low (the enhanced crop's colors don't match the original), feather_strength too small for the resolution, or inset_padding so large that the opaque region no longer covers the actual edited area.
• Blend looks like a soft blob. Switch blend_shape from ellipse to rectangle if the pasted region is rectangular - an ellipse blend on a rectangular crop will bleed oddly.

It's a small, specialized node, but it's the difference between "fixed" and "obviously fixed". Once you've seen a feathered, color-matched paste, you never want to go back to hard-edged compositing.