Vivid Sharpen

If you've ever sharpened a photo in Photoshop by duplicating the layer, running a High Pass filter, and setting the blend mode to Vivid Light, this node is that exact technique ported into ComfyUI. Two settings, no filters menu required: it builds an inverted, blurred high-pass layer from your image and blends it back in to add perceived crispness - a final-pass move for right after an upscale, or right before you save.

How it works

The node constructs a high-pass-style layer (invert plus blur, the classic recipe) at your chosen radius, then blends that layer back over the original at strength. A smaller radius targets fine detail and grain-level texture; a larger one produces a broader "clarity" style boost that reads more as overall punch than pixel-level sharpness. This is genuinely a final-image operation - it works on decoded pixels (IMAGE), not latents, so it belongs after your VAE decode, typically as the last thing before a Save Image node or right after an upscaler.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• images (IMAGE) - what you're sharpening.
• radius (default 1.5, range 0.01–64) - the blur radius used to build the high-pass layer. Lower values sharpen finer detail; higher values shift toward a broader contrast/clarity effect.
• strength (default 1, range 0–1) - how much of the sharpened result to mix back over the original. This is a straightforward 0-to-1 blend, unlike some of this pack's other tuning-heavy nodes.

Single output: images.

How to install it

Via ComfyUI Manager: search "WAS_Extras", install, restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/WASasquatch/WAS_Extras

Restart ComfyUI. No extra dependencies - this is a pure image-processing node, nothing to download.

Common issues & troubleshooting

Faces look crunchy or skin texture gets exaggerated. High-pass sharpening is notorious for this at high radius plus high strength - it amplifies whatever local contrast already exists, and skin pores are exactly the kind of fine-frequency detail this technique targets. Back strength down first; it's the more forgiving knob to pull back on than radius.

No visible effect at all. Check you're actually looking at the sharpened output and not a cached preview - and if strength is set low, the effect at low radius can be genuinely subtle at normal zoom. Zoom to 100% before judging.

You want more control than one strength slider gives you. That's exactly what Vivid Sharpen (V2) (VividSharpenV2) exists for - a torch-only reimplementation of this same technique with independently tunable blur radii, blend opacities, and a strength that can go past 1.0 for more aggressive results. Reach for this plain version when you just want "a bit crisper" with minimal fuss; reach for V2 when this one either isn't strong enough or is haloing and you want finer control over the sharpening mask itself.

Halos or ringing around high-contrast edges. A large radius on an image with strong hard edges (text, high-contrast object boundaries) is the classic way to get visible halos with this style of sharpening. Lower the radius, or lower the strength, before assuming something's broken - it's the technique behaving as designed, just pushed too far for that particular image.