00:00If you've already installed ComfyUI and are now ready to start getting creative with your own workflows, then this crash course will equip you with the core skills needed to make your ideas a reality

00:13I'll be providing key workflow examples, time-saving hints and tips, settings you may not be aware of, as well as how to start expanding beyond the basic nodes you get

00:25By the end, you'll have a toolbox full of Comfy Essentials ready to unleash your creations upon the world, so without any further ado, let's get to it, starting right at the beginning with a blank canvas, you'll soon see how easy it is to make a workflow

00:45That generates an image from text

00:48You can, of course, do a whole lot more than the workflow I'm about to show you, with one such example of doing a whole lot more being my free reposal workflow

01:00This started out with the idea of, can I make a consistent character just using a single face image and an image that I want that character to be posed in? As it turns out, like you can see there, yes, you can

01:16I've got my input face image, there's the pose, as you can see, it sort of detects the pose there, and then generates my character using that pose

01:26If I want a new pose, I simply pick that new pose and then regenerate, and there I have my Character in the new pose, after I created that one, I then expanded it to swap clothing and backgrounds as well, so it's, uh, yeah, if you have a quick look at the number of nodes there, it's very easy to get carried away

01:48All right, getting back to basic, back to our blank canvas, adding nodes is the very first thing that you need to master, and like with this example here, you'll typically want to start with a CAS sampler

02:01This is like the main engine of the workflow with controls for things like the seed and guidance scale sampler, all that sort of good stuff

02:13It's also the first thing that appears when you do that

02:17Double click there, K sampler, first thing in the menu

02:19That's not the only way that you can add nodes, because of course, you can do much the same thing by right clicking, add node, sampling, and I've got a K sampler there, there it is

02:30So we got exactly the same node by doing right click instead of double left click

02:35A third way to add nodes is one that I use quite a lot, and that's where you just drag a little noodle out from the thing and then pick from the list that is provided there

02:48I've added a model, it's not always the best list, it doesn't always work, but most of the time it is useful

02:56Nodes can be dragged around quite Easily, easily, just click anywhere on the blank bits, and you can also resize them from the corners

03:04Press the delete key on your keyboard to delete any selected node, and you've also got a little dot up in the corner, which you can use to toggle whether or not it is collapsed

03:17Time to drag some more noodles out of our little friend there, the K sampler

03:22First thing we want is a text encode prompts, we've got there for the positive, and then same again for the negative

03:31The final input we have on that is a latent image, so once again, I'm using that one, and the one I want is an empty latent image, there it's got the size 512 we want

03:40To see the image our text will generate, so let's do something with this output

03:45Once again, we'll drag that noodle, we'll do a decode, that gives another output, we've got there, okay, and there I'm going to do preview image

03:53Of course, you could save it if you wanted to save

03:59Wow, that's almost a complete workflow

04:06If you look very closely at the colors for the inputs and outputs on each node, you'll see there is still a red VAE and some yellow nodes to connect as well

04:12Matching the colors makes it really easy, but you should also see that when I try to drag a noodle out, all the other options go gray, and literally the only one I Can connect it to, is that VAE

04:23So let's do the same thing with the yellow nodes

04:28We've got a clip into a clip, a clip into a clip, and now we have a completed workflow

04:33All it needs now is input from your imagination

04:36So let's use this as an awesome positive prompt, click up our Q prompt, and see what it generates

04:46Excellent! I now have a rather cool radent, we make him a little bit bigger there, fantastic stuff

04:50So you now want to do something a bit like a high res fix, you want most of the nodes that you've already got up there and wired in much the same way, not a problem, hold down the control key and you can select multiple nodes

05:08Okay, so I've done a little area select there, but you can also select the nodes individually, press Ctrl+C to copy

05:16I'm going to zoom out a little bit, and then Shift+Ctrl+V to paste where my cursor is, and now I've got a new set of nodes there, and they're already connected

05:26If you don't want them connected, just do a plain Ctrl+V, and that will paste without, they're still selected, so if I hold the Shift key, I can also move them around as a group, so if I didn't quite paste them in the right place, that's not a problem either

05:44The other thing you can do is make a little group out of them as well, so if you right-click anywhere on The canvas, add group for selected nodes, will give them a little group, which makes them even easier to move around and to sort of see what each section does

06:00If you made a mistake, you can just press Ctrl+Z, and that will undo

06:01So say I moved it down there by accident, no, actually, I want it back where it was, Ctrl+Z, and that will undo

06:13If you, if you actually want to undo your undo, you can do Ctrl+Y, and that will redo

06:15Now that's nearly a high-res fix, but one thing that's left to do is just change this one noodle, because obviously I want the output from that case sampler to go through here, okay, so let's do that, let's add

06:28A new latent upscale node, there it is

06:31Got a search bar there, so you can just type in words to search for

06:35We've got one there, latent upscale, let's put that in

06:37Okay, so we'll connect that noodle out from there, and that new one is going to go into there, because I want to do a little upscale

06:45I'm going to go all the way up to 1024 for that one, if I can type

06:50There it is

06:55I've got my upscale latent node in there, and one last thing to do here, obviously, I want the denoise a little bit lower, otherwise that's going to just change the image completely

07:00All right, let's fire that one off and see if it works

07:02Will I get a little bit of a Latent upscale, yes, I will

07:05There he goes

07:07He's got a very nice tie

07:09As you can see, there's a little bit more detail, and obviously that's 512 x 512, that's 1024 x 1024

07:17Maybe this set of nodes is something you want to do a lot of, in which case, why not make it a template? Okay, so let's select those three nodes, and if I right click anywhere on the template, I can select "save selected nodes as template." I can give it a name

07:27There we go

07:37Let's just give it a name for now, and I've now saved those three nodes as a template, which I can pop into any workflow at any time just by selecting that node templates, and there I've got a name, so there

07:47I've done it, and I've got another set of templates in there, as you can see, IP adapter basic, there you go

07:55So it's very handy when you've got one node which takes a particular set of inputs, and it tends to always be the same inputs, so that's quite nice

08:03And here's another little template I've got, no templates, prompt everywhere, that's very handy, just takes the text prompts and prompts things everywhere, so that's absolutely fantastic

08:12But now I've got loads of nodes everywhere, absolutely everywhere, and normally to move, you need to find a bit of blank canvas, but perhaps you can't find a bit of blank canvas

08:24Because you've tied everything together really neatly, and you haven't got any space, but that doesn't matter, because you can actually press space wherever your cursor is, and that will let you move the canvas around, so there's no need to find a little bit to click, you can just press space and move around whenever you like

08:45Another thing that some people don't like is all these noodles, I mean look at that spaghetti, isn't that not very neat at all? Well, there are some things you can do with that, for example, we got this little cog over here on the menu, and if you scroll down a bit, that will give you link render

09:00Mode, by default, it's spline, but perhaps you like straight, so there are the straight lines, in which case, there you go

09:07Now we've got things going straight instead, lots of different options in there, so pick the one that you prefer

09:14Chances are you'll want to add some sort of custom node, but how do you install them, and where do you even find what's available, and what about keeping ComfyUI up to date? Well, if you don't already have ComfyUI Manager installed, then now is the time to do it, because it will manage all your custom node and updating needs

09:35Essentially, this is the only custom node you'll need to install

09:40This way, because then the manager will install everything for you, so I'm going to go into custom nodes, exactly like it says there, and then get clone that, copy and paste, download that, restart ComfyUI, and you have ComfyUI manager installed, really, really easy

09:57If you've not yet installed ComfyUI normally, and so you're using the Microsoft Windows portable, do note the instructions for that case where here, you'll first have to download and install Git for Windows, and then download their install manager for portable bat, so you can just download that, and that will essentially do the Git clone command for

10:21You scrolling down further, other installations are available too

10:27There's instructions there for Linux with VEnv, and also for collab notebooks

10:32With ComfyUI manager installed, you'll now get this extra button down there, manager and share as well

10:40Click manager, and you'll get the ComfyUI manager menu

10:42Here's where you can install custom nodes

10:45Just click install custom nodes, and you'll get a whole bunch of things there

10:49As there's lots of nodes, I suggest using the search if you're looking for particular things, and also note these yellow things here will give you information about possible

11:01Conflicts with nodes you've already got installed, if you've loaded somebody else's workflow, then the install missing custom node button is your friend, and along with the update all button being a lifesaver when it comes to keeping all of your custom nodes, as well as ComfyUI itself, up to date

11:23Now, one thing you might have noticed is the little badges on some of my notes, like this one says ComfyUI IP adapter plus, so I know where I got it from

11:34How am I getting those little badges? Well, it's in manager, there you got badge nickname, and there are a few other options you can pick as well, talking of handy little

11:45Options and settings, this ComfyUI custom scripts is another custom node I suggest you install because it's got loads of additional features

11:56For example, if I go back to that little cog, you'll see a bunch of things in here have a little snake on them, and that's all from the custom node

12:06And one of the things I absolutely love is this option here, always snap to grid

12:10Now, by default, when you're moving a node around, you have to hold the shift key to have it snap to grid, but with that tick, you don't ever have to hold the shift down, it always snaps, so you can keep everything nice and neatly aligned

12:24The other thing you get

12:26With that is custom colors, which I find really handy

12:29You can right click on a node, there's colors, and now we've got a custom colors down at the bottom with a palette, so you can go absolutely wild and have some brilliantly colored nodes everywhere

12:42Personally, I find colors really, really handy

12:45Not quite sure how I developed a color scheme, but now I love coloring stuff in, and uh, workflows just seem to make sense with colors to me

12:55Anyway, there's a whole bunch of other features that this adds as well, so I do suggest going to have a look at the GitHub page for all the extras that you get just with that one custom node, some

13:08People don't like noodles everywhere, and one set of nodes which can really help reduce your noodle load is "Use Everywhere," or U nodes

13:16This example workflow uses one simple node from that pack, "Anything Everywhere Three." It just connects in the model, the clip, and the VAE, so you've got a little self-contained thing there, and anywhere it needs a model, clip, or VAE, it automatically connects

13:36Now, you'll see sort of a double circle around some of them, that's because "Anything Everywhere" is connected to that

13:44If you really don't know where things are, then that's absolutely fine, because you can show U links, and then You'll see the noodles that it is hiding

13:54One great way to practice is by using workflows from other people as an example, and I've got a ton of them for you for free over on the A Very Comfy Nerd website

14:04Also, if you're a Patreon, then you'll get bonus workflows too

14:07One thing to note, if you're using certain models such as the SDXL Turbo and Stable Video Diffusion ones, uh, they do have a slightly different license to previous models, as you can see there, Stability AI non-commercial research community license agreement, uh, the main thing there being the new non-commercial edition

14:31Now they have released

14:34Some news that there's going to be a subscription model coming soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that

14:41Should you be feeling creative and ready to start getting your ideas into workflows, but haven't yet installed ComfyUI, then do check out this next video.