Cinematic Upscale & Restore

A tuned ComfyUI upscale-and-restore pipeline — 4× detail, film grain and grade, without the plastic look.

Cinematic Upscale & Restore is a battle-tested ComfyUI graph that takes a 1MP render to a clean 4× print-ready frame: tiled diffusion upscale, face-and-eye restoration, controlled sharpening, and an optional film-grain-plus-grade finish. Every value is dialled so you avoid the over-sharpened, waxy look most upscalers fall into.

This is a workflow, not weights. You get a ComfyUI graph (workflow.json) you import into your own tool. You supply the base models it calls — the value here is the wiring and the dialled-in parameters.

Workflow details

What it does

Feeds your image through a tiled SDXL upscale at 4×, runs a light face/eye restore pass only where faces are detected, applies edge-aware sharpening, then finishes with a subtle film-grain and colour-grade group you can bypass with one toggle. Tiling keeps VRAM flat regardless of output size.

Required custom nodes

• ComfyUI-Impact-Pack
• ComfyUI_UltimateSDUpscale
• ComfyUI-Custom-Scripts

Base models you must supply

• An SDXL checkpoint of your choice (your base look)
• A 4× ESRGAN-family upscale model (e.g. 4x-UltraSharp)
• An SDXL VAE if your checkpoint has none baked in

Inputs & outputs

How to run

1. Import workflow.json via ComfyUI → Load.
2. Install the three custom-node packs (ComfyUI-Manager will offer them as missing).
3. Point the checkpoint, upscale-model and VAE loaders at your files.
4. Drop your image into the Load Image node and queue.
5. Toggle the grain/grade group off for a clean master.

Samples

Motion sample

A short clip rendered with this listing — click to play the HLS stream.

Limitations

• 4× on a large input needs a capable GPU even with tiling — drop to 2× on low VRAM.
• Face restore can smooth intentional texture; lower its denoise for grungy looks.
• Tuned for SDXL; SD1.5 checkpoints need the tile size reduced.

License & provenance

Authored and tuned by the creator; ships as a plain workflow JSON. Purchasing the commercial offer ($79.00) grants a commercial redistribution license for outputs; the personal offer ($19.00) is for non-commercial use. The workflow graph may be used in your own projects but not resold or repackaged as a product.

Citation

@misc{nova-labs_00000019,
  title  = {Cinematic Upscale & Restore},
  author = {Nova Labs (@nova-labs)},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {TensorForge marketplace workflow, LST-00000019-0000-4000-8000-000000000019}
}