VELVET VICE KREA — Selected Base Preview

"VELVET VICE KREA - Selected Base Preview" is the checkpoint in the Velvet Vice Krea 2 workflow where you're supposed to look at the render before refinement starts changing it. It takes the four branch images (CREATE, both Native Edit variants, Classic Img2Img), routes to whichever one your Mode Selector picked, saves a preview of it, and hands it on to the refinement stage. If the base is wrong, you catch it here instead of after two more sampler passes.

The Image Router with a screenshot button

Mechanically this node is the pack's Image Router wearing an output hat. It has the same four lazy image inputs and the same mode-driven routing - only the active branch's image is ever resolved, so the other three never render. But where the plain router just passes the image through, this node also runs it through ComfyUI's PreviewImage and saves it with the VELVET_VICE_KREA_BASE_PREVIEW prefix.

The lazy part matters more than it looks. Because the inputs are lazy, this node can preview the selected branch without dragging the other three branches into existence. In a workflow that keeps four independent pipelines on one canvas, that's what makes "preview the base of my current mode" a cheap operation instead of a four-way render.

Inputs and outputs

• workflow_mode - a VELVET_VICE_KREA_MODE, wired from the Mode Selector. It decides which of the four images is "selected."
• create_image, native_original_image, native_custom_image, classic_img2img_image - the four branch IMAGEs, all lazy.

Outputs:

• selected_image - the IMAGE from the active branch, passed onward toward refinement.
• active_branch - STRING, the mode that was selected, for logging or display.

It's marked as an output node, so it also pushes UI status to the queue - something like "CREATE base complete - before refinement" - which lands in the node's status area and in the metadata of the saved PNG. That's a nice touch when you're flipping between modes and want to know which one produced a given file.

How it differs from the sibling previews

There are three "preview" nodes in this pack and the names blur together, so here's the short version. Create Base Preview and Create Refinement Preview (the passthroughs) are CREATE-branch-only checkpoints that don't know about modes. This node, Selected Base Preview, is the mode-aware one - it handles all four branches and only previews the one you're running. If your mode isn't CREATE and you're wondering why the "Create" previews show nothing, this is the node that actually has your back.

Installing

It's part of velvet-vice-krea, installed like the whole pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Velvet-Vice/velvet-vice-krea

Restart ComfyUI, or use ComfyUI Manager and search "VELVET VICE - KREA". No pip dependencies or bundled models.

The one failure mode worth knowing: if the selected branch's image isn't connected, the node raises a clear "selected input 'X' is not connected" error rather than silently previewing nothing. And if you get a base preview you didn't like, that's the moment to stop and fix the prompt or seed - refinement and SeedVR2 will only polish what's already on the canvas.