Color Map Alien (MD)

Let's be honest about mdColorMapAlien up front: it's a toy. It's a GIMP-style "Alien" color map that takes your image and modulates the color channels with sine waves, producing those trippy, banded, pseudo-infrared-looking results. If you're here because you saw "alien" in the name and want to make something weird, this is your node. If you're here because you need to correct color, you're in the wrong room.

How it works

The mechanism is straightforward and very controllable once you see it. Each RGB channel gets modulated by a sine function driven by the image's own pixel values: output = f(value, frequency, phase). The frequency dials how many cycles of the wave each channel's value sweeps through, and the shift dials the phase - the starting point of the wave. The result is a color map where smooth gradients become repeating bands of color. In Model you can pick whether the modulation runs in RGB (direct, brash, banding across the channels) or HSL (smoother, keeps a recognizable luminance structure - the more "washed with color" look).

The per-channel Keep_red / Keep_green / Keep_blue toggles are the escape hatch: enable one and that channel passes through untouched, so you can, say, keep the image looking like a photo in the red channel while green and blue go psychedelic. That's how you get the "one-channel weirdness" look that reads as stylized rather than broken.

The controls (there are a lot, but they're simple)

• Model - RGB or HSL.
• Red/Green/Blue_frequency (0-20) - the wave count. Low values (0.5-2) give broad color shifts; high values (10+) give tight posterized banding.
• Red/Green/Blue_shift (0-360) - phase in degrees. Fine-tuning where the bands land.
• Keep_red/green/blue - per-channel passthrough.
• image in, image out, optional mask.

When you'd actually use it

Three honest use cases. One: stylized cover art or music visuals where "AI photo, but not" is the goal. Two: pseudo-color for technical images - false-color mapping of a luminance or depth-ish pass into a rainbow, which the RGB model does beautifully if you push frequencies. Three: texture generation - feed it a noise tile and the sinusoidal mapping produces a rich procedural pattern. It also makes a great preview generator for testing masks, since it amplifies tonal separation. What it is not: subtle. There's no strength slider, so every result is loud. If that's what you want, this is the most fun node in MdColorMod - the rest of the pack is correction, this one is pure styling.

Installing

Standard MdColorMod setup:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/MdONeilsl/ComfyUI-MdColorMod

or ComfyUI Manager → "MdColorMod", restart. No dependencies (empty requirements.txt), pure torch, no model downloads, GPL-3.0. The pack is young and thin on community presence - if Manager can't find it, clone manually.