Introduction

What if cleaning up a shot felt like painting a single frame? Paint a Plate is a new open-source ComfyUI node pack and browser app from VFX studio AInVFX, built as its entry in Comfy's #OpenSourceHiggsfield contest. You paint on the first frame of a clip to erase, add or relight something. The edit shows up on that frame in seconds, then carries through the entire shot.

It runs only on open weights: FLUX 3 Image Klein edits the frame, LTX 2.5 carries the change through time, and SAM 3.1 tracks objects. Version 1.0.0 ("the contest version") shipped on October 30, followed by 1.0.4 the same evening. It's on the Comfy Registry, and the code is Apache 2.0.

How it works

Every step is a plain ComfyUI workflow that ships in the repo's web/workflows folder:

  • Frame edit: FLUX 3 Image Klein edits the first frame, with a quick pass at 768 px followed by full size. Klein's own prompt upsampler, a Qwen 3.5 9B model from Black Forest Labs, expands your few words into a full caption
  • Tracking: SAM 3.1 finds whole objects and follows every edit through the shot
  • Erase pass: Lightricks' in-outpainting IC-LoRA regenerates erased areas
  • Carry-through: WepeNerd's Ripple IC-LoRA on LTX 2.5 carries paint and light edits across every frame
  • Fluid shots: AInVFX's own ainvfx-fluid IC-LoRA turns flat painted blobs into smoke, steam, fire, explosions, dust, fog or clouds, starting from a blank plate

The pack adds twelve nodes for jobs core ComfyUI can't do, such as Load Plate, Save Plate, Color Space (OCIO), Follow Matte, Relight Transfer and HDR Match.

The three brushes

  • Paint adds what you describe where you paint, and it may adjust nearby pixels so a fire can light what it touches
  • Erase removes the object under your stroke. Switch on Whole object and name it ("red umbrella") so SAM 3.1 grabs all of it
  • Light relights the shot. Pick a color, paint where the light comes from, and describe it if you like ("warm sunset from the left")

Renders build up in stages: a fast 640 px preview, then full size, then a full-size composite at the plate's quality. You can review EXR results against the original EXR through OpenColorIO, with viewer keys that follow OpenRV.

Pipeline-friendly export

This is the part compositors will love. Export writes the result in the plate's own format: same file type, bit depth, frame numbers, color tags, timecode, audio and EXR layers. Every pixel you didn't touch stays identical to the source, and you get a matte as well.

The Export dialog can also save the whole scene as one ComfyUI graph, organized into numbered sections (plate, models, each edit, tracking, erase pass, shot, export). Each section opens with a README note, so you can take it over and tweak it by hand.

Install

You need ComfyUI v0.43.0 or newer plus ComfyUI-LTXVideo. Install from the Manager by searching Paint a plate, or with comfy-cli:

comfy node install ainvfx-paintaplate

Then accept the gated licenses for FLUX 3 Image Klein, LTX 2.5 and the in-outpainting IC-LoRA on Hugging Face, set HF_TOKEN, and run the bundled get_models.py (about 60 GB of models). Open the app here:

http://127.0.0.1:8188/extensions/ainvfx-paintaplate/paintaplate.html

Hardware: AInVFX recommends and has tested 32 GB of VRAM or more. The full-size pass runs at up to 1920 × 1088 and 121 frames. On a smaller card or a Mac, the repo includes a Runpod script that sets up ComfyUI, the nodes and the models in about three minutes on an RTX PRO 6000.

Limits to know

  • Edits are painted on the first frame only, and shots max out at 121 frames
  • A cast shadow outside an erased object stays until you erase it with a second stroke
  • Additions painted across a foreground object can break up mid-shot, so paint them in open space
  • SDR-to-HDR is hidden for now because its shots flicker (?hdr=1 turns it on for testing)

License check

The app code is Apache 2.0. LTX 2.5 and its IC-LoRAs (Ripple, in-outpainting, ainvfx-fluid) use the LTX-2.x Community License, which requires a paid license above $10M in annual revenue. SAM 3.1 has its own SAM License. AInVFX's 23 synthetic test plates are on Hugging Face under CC BY 4.0.

Conclusion

Paint a Plate feels like an AI paintbrush built by people who actually ship shots. It respects the plate, keeps your color pipeline honest, and hands you back an editable graph. If you've got a big GPU and footage that needs a cleanup, it's well worth an evening.

Want to try the Klein-style frame edit first? Try this on Gen → https://artrealmai.com/gen?utm_source=magazine&utm_campaign=gen&utm_content=paint-a-plate-comfyui-erase-add-relight-shot-flux-3-klein-ltx-2-5

Original Source

Go paint a little magic into your plates!

—Aurelia ♡