Channel Split

Overview

Splits a color image into grayscale images representing lightness, chroma, hue, RGB components, alpha, and other channels. Use a particular component as a mask, or adjust individual components before restoring the image with Channel Merge.

Examples

• Use a from OKLCH to make a lightness mask and adjust only the shadows.
• Use a from HSV to process only the hue separately.
• Extract alpha and use transparent areas as a mask for another node.

Usage tips

• The go-to pattern is a round trip through channel_merge: split → process one component → merge again. This enables component-specific operations such as adding noise only to lightness or blurring only saturation.
• Port labels follow the selected space: L/C/H for OKLCH, H/S/V for HSV, and R/G/B for RGB.
• The Alpha output encodes transparency in an opaque grayscale image: white means opaque and black means transparent; the grayscale output image itself has alpha 1.
• Extracted components also work well as grayscale masks on their own and retain more information than threshold.

Related nodes

• channel_merge — the matching node for recombination
• threshold / levels — process an extracted component
• gradient_map — map a component back to color