img_effect_Liquify

This node sits in the pack's own Deprecated category, alongside the other three img_effect_* distortion nodes. It still runs - nothing's been pulled - but the author's marked it as legacy, so treat it as the node you fall back to for this specific effect rather than the current recommendation for new work. It's this pack's take on Photoshop's Liquify tool, minus the interactive brush: instead of dragging a cursor around live, you set a center point, a radius, a mode, and a strength, and it applies one deformation in a single pass.

How it works

It picks a circular region (center_x/center_y, radius) and deforms everything inside it according to mode: PUSH and PULL move pixels radially - away from or toward the center - the classic "bulge" and "pinch" effects. TWIST rotates pixels around the center, spiraling the content. PINCH compresses toward the center more sharply than PULL, for a tighter squeeze effect. strength (which can go negative, effectively flipping most modes' direction) controls how far pixels move, and feather softens the boundary of the affected circle so the edge fades rather than cutting off sharply.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• image (required) - what you're deforming.
• center_x / center_y (FLOAT, 0–1, default 0.5) - where the effect is centered.
• radius (FLOAT, 0.01–2, default 0.3) - how far the effect reaches. Note this one can go past 1, letting the affected zone extend beyond the image bounds if you want a gentler falloff across the whole frame.
• strength (FLOAT, -5 to 5, default 1) - deformation intensity; sign flips direction on most modes.
• mode - PUSH, PULL, TWIST, or PINCH.
• feather (FLOAT, 0.1–2, default 0.5) - softness of the effect's edge falloff.

One output: IMAGE, the deformed result.

How to install it

ComfyUI Manager: search ComfyUI-Apt_Preset, install, restart. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/cardenluo/ComfyUI-Apt_Preset
pip install -r requirements.txt

install.bat is Windows-only; on Linux (comfy.icu's executor included) run pip install -r requirements.txt directly. No model downloads - the pack's general requirements.txt covers what a warp effect like this needs (opencv-python-headless, scipy), on top of a much longer list for the rest of the suite.

Common issues

Faces are the classic use for this kind of effect (subtle PUSH/PULL around eyes or jawline), and they're also where it's easiest to overdo - small strength values go a long way at typical portrait scale, and pushing past roughly ±2 tends to look obviously distorted rather than subtly retouched unless that's the look you're after. Start low and increase gradually.

TWIST is the mode most likely to produce visible artifacting at the boundary if feather is too low - a hard-edged spiral against an untouched background reads as an obvious circular seam. Raise feather first if a TWIST result looks like it has a visible ring around it.

Because this node is deprecated with no named successor for this specific effect in the current schema, if you hit a real limitation there's no newer node in this pack to switch to - your options are tuning these five parameters harder, or reaching for a different pack's warp/liquify tool. Standard pack-wide install note applies too: a fresh ComfyUI-Apt_Preset install pulls a large, mostly-unrelated requirements.txt, and there's a documented case of that failing to import - if you hit IMPORT FAILED, check the ComfyUI console for the specific missing package.