Introducing LINK — node-graph generation for any vendor
Generative tools make you take the whole frame or throw it away. LINK gives compositors back the parts.
Every generative image tool has the same problem. You get a frame, and you take it or you leave it.
If the composition is right but the hands are wrong, you re-roll and lose the composition. If the light is right but the background moved, you re-roll and lose the light. The tools are extraordinary at producing an image and hopeless at producing this image with that one thing changed. Anyone who has tried to use them on a real shot has hit this within an hour.
Compositors solved this problem thirty years ago. You break the image into parts, you work the part that is wrong, and you leave everything else alone. It is the entire basis of node-graph compositing and it is why Nuke looks the way it does.
LINK brings that idea to generative work.
It is a node-graph compositor that runs in the browser. You isolate a region, adjust or regenerate just that region, and carry the rest of the frame forward untouched. Selections are editable rather than fixed, so a mask you made three steps ago can still be refined. The graph is the record of what you did, which means it can be revised, reviewed and handed to someone else.
The point is not speed. It is authorship. An artist working in LINK is making decisions about an image rather than filing requests and hoping. The generative model is a tool inside the comp rather than the thing that replaces it.
LINK runs on any of the vendors we support, so a studio is not committing to one model provider in order to work this way. Output is colour-managed on the way out, and provenance is attached, because a frame that cannot be graded or accounted for is not finished work.
We built LINK because we needed it. Twenty-five years of compositing made the gap obvious, and nothing on the market was closing it.
LINK is part of the Lenscowboy platform. Get in touch for access.