How To Install ComfyUI On Photoshop & Secret Settings Unlocked!

Imagine your most powerful creative tool suddenly gaining a direct line to a local AI brain. No cloud middleman. No subscription gatekeeping your imagination. That's what happens when ComfyUI moves into Adobe Photoshop... and Nima just handed us the blueprint.

The Setup Nobody Told You Would Be This Straightforward

Three paths to install. That's it.

Open Adobe Creative Cloud, hit the plugins section on the right side, search for "ComfyUI for Adobe Photoshop," and download. If Creative Cloud gives you grief... grab the CCX file and double-click. If even that fights you... use the ZXP/UXP installer with a drag and drop.

Three doors. Same room. Pick the one that opens.

Git, Clone, Go

Before ComfyUI does anything useful, you need Git installed. Download it. Click next until your finger gets bored. Make sure you enable that one checkbox Nima highlights. Then next, next, install.

Now grab ComfyUI itself. Decompress it wherever makes sense on your machine. Done.

But here's where the real magic starts. Navigate into `ComfyUI/custom_nodes`, type CMD in the path bar, and clone ComfyUI Manager using the git command Nima provides. This manager becomes your mission control... handling extensions, missing nodes, model installs. The stage crew behind the curtain. Quietly working so you don't have to wrestle with dependencies manually.

The Backend Workflow... This Is the Part That Matters

Here's the thing most folks miss.

A vanilla ComfyUI setup won't talk to the Photoshop plugin. You need a specific backend workflow JSON file from OpenArt. Drag it into ComfyUI. You'll see red nodes everywhere... don't panic. Open the manager, update all, close (don't restart yet), then install missing custom nodes. Select all. Install. Close the terminal completely and relaunch.

Patience here saves you hours later. Like the old saying... three months without food, three days without water, three minutes without hope. Give yourself the space to let the install breathe.

Since Stable Diffusion runs locally, you'll also need to download specific model files... checkpoints, inpainting models, and additional resources listed on the OpenArt page. Drag them into the right folders. Use ComfyUI Manager's model installer for the rest.

How the Data Actually Flows

This is where it gets beautiful.

Two nodes form the entire bridge. The Photoshop ComfyUI Plugin node pulls your canvas, mask, slider values, seed, and prompts straight from Photoshop. The Send to Photoshop node pushes your processed image back. That's the round trip. Input. Process. Output.

Think of it like the Millennium Falcon's nav computer. Photoshop is your cockpit. ComfyUI is the hyperdrive doing the calculations behind the wall panels.

Nima demonstrates this live... queue a render, get a preview of your Photoshop canvas and mask instantly. Change the prompt in Photoshop, watch it update in real time on the ComfyUI side. Invert an image through a simple node chain and BAM... it appears back in your Photoshop plugin panel.

Anything Everywhere... The Node That Changes Everything

Here's where the workflow goes from functional to elegant.

The Anything Everywhere node broadcasts data wirelessly across your node graph. No visible wires snaking across your workspace. Connect your Photoshop plugin outputs to Anything Everywhere nodes, and downstream nodes pick up the signal automatically. Hover your mouse over one and you see glowing connection lines showing exactly where data flows.

Clean. Readable. Maintainable.

For the nerds in the room... this is like going from a tangled server room to wireless mesh networking. Same data. Zero cable spaghetti.

Naming conventions drive the automatic routing. Leave an input as default and it connects to the positive prompt. Rename the slot to "neg" and it routes to the negative prompt. Rename to "input" and you get the raw Photoshop canvas at full resolution instead of the resolution-limited version from settings.

Small naming choices. Massive workflow implications.

Custom Workflows and Render Settings

Want your own workflow preset visible in the Photoshop plugin? Add a group in ComfyUI. Name it. Refresh. It appears in your plugin's preset tab.

Want it to appear as a render setting instead? Change the group color to green. That's the trigger. Green group equals render setting. Any other color equals workflow preset.

Nima demonstrates building an SDXL Lightning render setting from scratch... adding a checkpoint like DreamShaper XL Lightning, wiring in a LoRA, configuring a KSampler with custom steps and schedulers, and connecting everything through Anything Everywhere nodes. The result shows up in Photoshop immediately as a switchable render option.

The KSampler widgets can be converted from static values to dynamic inputs. Right-click, convert widgets to input... and they automatically bind to your global render settings. Change the render setting dropdown in Photoshop, and every connected KSampler updates. Fully dynamic. Fully switchable.

The Hidden Architecture

Dig deeper and you find grouped nodes disguised as single settings blocks. Right-click, convert to nodes, and you can see the internal wiring. Modify what you need. Convert back to a group node. Use the manage option to hide widgets you don't want cluttering the interface.

This is modular design thinking applied to creative AI. Build it once. Customize it forever.

Why This Matters for Creators

This isn't about replacing your eye or your hand. It's about giving your creative instincts a faster engine.

Inpainting. Outpainting. Style transfers. Image-to-image transformations. All happening locally on your machine, triggered from inside the tool you already know... Photoshop.

No cloud latency. No per-image costs. No uploading your client work to someone else's server.

Your creativity. Your hardware. Your rules.

Nima built something generous here. A free plugin. A clear tutorial. A bridge between two powerful worlds. If you're a digital artist who's been curious about AI but didn't want to leave Photoshop to explore it... this is your doorway. Install it. Break it. Rebuild it better. That's how we learn. That's how we grow. And if the node graph looks overwhelming at first... remember... light doesn't fight darkness. It just shows up. Open the workflow. Start connecting nodes. You'll find your way. 💙

--- Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD09xpQrNZ4