SEGS Sharpen Hook

Detail passes exist to make small regions crisper, but the sampler's idea of "crisper" isn't always the same as a good sharpening pass - sometimes the decoded crop comes back with soft edges that need a nudge, sometimes it comes back over-sharp and needs restraint. XJSegsSharpenHookProvider is the hook that applies a proper unsharp mask to the crop after the detail pass decodes, before it's pasted back into the image. It's the sharpening equivalent of the pack's Blur Hook - same machinery, opposite direction.

The mechanism is textbook unsharp masking: blur a copy of the image, then add strength × (original − blurred) back to the original. That formula is why the edge of the mask sharpens while flat areas stay untouched - unsharp masking enhances contrast only where there's already contrast, so it rarely adds that nasty "everything is crunchy" look a naive sharpen filter produces. radius sets the blur kernel size (the scale of detail being sharpened), and strength sets the amount (up to 8.0 in this node, which is a lot - you'll almost never go that high). And as with the other hooks in this family, when a segment mask is available the effect stays inside the masked region, with feather controlling the softness of that boundary.

The interface:

• radius - 1–25, default 2. Detail scale; small radius sharpens fine detail, larger radius catches broader edges.
• strength - 0–8, default 1.5. The unsharp amount.
• feather - 0–100, default 0. Edge softness of the masked effect.
• Output: hook, into detailer_hook on FaceDetailer / Detailer (SEGS).

Where it fits: when the detailer's output is technically correct but renders soft - a low-denoise pass that barely changes the crop can leave it looking like a watercolor. A light sharpen (radius 2, strength 1.0–1.5) recovers the crispness without re-sampling. It's also the finishing touch in the two-pass setup where you detail one region and want the subject to pop against a blurred background (which the pack's Blur Hook handles).

Install is the pack-wide routine:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/alexjx/ComfyUI-XJNodes

Restart ComfyUI, find it under XJNodes/segs/hooks, or use ComfyUI Manager and search "ComfyUI-XJNodes". No models, empty requirements.txt, no extra pip packages - Impact Pack just needs to be around for the hook input.

Personal-pack honesty: no tutorials exist for this node, so the defaults (2 / 1.5) are the author's taste, not a verified best practice. Start there and back strength off to ~1.0 if the region starts to look gritty - over-sharpening reads worse than under-sharpening, especially on faces.