OpenLayer - Open Source Photoshop ComfyUI Plugin

OpenLayer is an open-source Photoshop ComfyUI plugin for local AI layers.

OpenLayer is an open-source Adobe Photoshop UXP plugin that connects Photoshop to a locally running ComfyUI server for text-to-image, image-to-image, sketch-to-image, preview, and importing AI results into the active Photoshop document as editable layers.

Alpha Release

v0.16.0-alpha is the current public alpha checkpoint. It is intended for testing the core local workflows in Photoshop UXP, not for production work yet.

New in v0.16.0-alpha:

• Artist-Friendly Dark, a third theme. A deeper, softer dark meant to sit behind artwork rather than match the Photoshop toolbar, offered in Settings alongside Compact Adobe Dark and Classic v0.4. It is the theme that turns the numeric parameters into sliders. Compact Adobe Dark is untouched — switching themes changes nothing about the panel you already know.
• Sliders for the numeric parameters, in Artist-Friendly Dark. Detail (steps), Guidance (CFG), Strength (denoise) and the others become sliders; Compact Adobe Dark keeps its number boxes. One control, two faces — the number input is still the source of truth and the slider writes through to it, so nothing about how a value is read or validated changed.
• A dice button on the seed field, on every tool that has one — roll a fresh random seed instead of typing one.
• The Advanced settings disclosure remembers whether you left it open, per screen, stored separately from the generation defaults so Reset Settings does not re-collapse a screen you chose to keep open.
• FLUX.2 Klein inpainting: inpaint-flux2-klein. The first inpaint preset that is not a Flux Fill model. It reuses the Klein 4B stack you already have for Text to Image — no extra model download — and repaints a selection at four steps, using the same comfyui-inpaint-cropandstitch node pack as the crop-and-stitch Flux Fill preset. Experimental; strongest at adding to a small selection or replacing a large region.
• The seed field no longer mangles wide seeds to 214748.36. A UXP number input cannot hold a value that large, so any seed wider than six digits — including every seed loaded from History — came back mangled and then failed the run with "Seed must be a whole number". The seed fields are plain numeric text fields now and hold the full range.

Also new in v0.15.0-alpha:

• An AI assistant can drive OpenLayer's tools. Ask Claude — or Codex, or anything else that speaks the Model Context Protocol — to generate an image, upscale a layer or caption a selection, and it works the panel's own buttons in your open document. All seven tools are reachable. It runs entirely on your machine and is off until you turn it on, in Setup → Agent Bridge.

  The bridge contains no Photoshop code: it can only run a tool the panel already has and read back what the panel said happened. An agent-driven generation and a clicked one are the same code path, so the same safety rules apply to both.

• The bridge is not in the download. A Photoshop plugin package cannot install or start a Node program, so it lives in the repository: clone or download it, then cd bridge && npm install && npm run hub. bridge/README.md covers the setup and the one line that registers it with your AI client.

• Ask the Agent for a Prompt, under the Text to Image prompt box — the panel asking the assistant for once. Needs an AI client that supports MCP sampling; see the boundaries below.

• Version drift is a test failure now. v0.14.0-alpha displayed v0.13.0 in the panel footer, in both diagnostics lines, and in the version recorded against every session-history entry, because the number lives in eight places and one of them moved file. npm test now names whichever file disagrees.

• FLUX.2 Klein 4B, text-to-image, image-to-image, and instruction editing. Three new presets — txt2img-flux2-klein, img2img-flux2-klein, and edit-flux2-klein — run Black Forest Labs' distilled Klein 4B at 4 steps, CFG 1. A 1024x1024 generation completed in 11.6 seconds on a 4070 Ti. The download is 4.07 GB (flux-2-klein-4b-fp8.safetensors) plus a 336 MB VAE; the 8 GB qwen_3_4b.safetensors text encoder is the same file the Z_image_Turbo presets already use. Every node is core ComfyUI — no new custom-node packages — and Klein is Apache-2.0 and ungated.

• Instruction editing is not image-to-image. edit-flux2-klein tells the model what to change ("make the jacket red", "turn the sky to dusk") instead of describing the whole picture. It starts from an empty latent at denoise 1 and supplies your layer as conditioning through ReferenceLatent, so the model follows the instruction while seeing what the scene is. Denoise is hidden because it is fixed at 1 — that is the technique, not a default.

• Context-aware Inpaint: inpaint-flux-fill-cropstitch. A second Flux Fill preset that crops to your mask plus context, samples that at 1024x1024, and stitches the patch back with a blended seam, using lquesada's ComfyUI-Inpaint-CropAndStitch. A small mask on a large document no longer samples a few hundred pixels, and a large one no longer samples several thousand. It ships alongside inpaint-flux-fill-basic rather than replacing it, because the custom-node dependency is optional.

• Image to Image results land where they came from. The imported layer could arrive offset from the layer it was generated from. Capture now records where in the document it read from, and the import moves the layer there explicitly.

Also new in v0.14.0-alpha:

• Sketch to Image has two presets that are not SD 1.x. Both load Alibaba-PAI's Z-Image Fun ControlNet Union patch on the Z_image_Turbo stack the other tools already use, so the only new download is the patch itself. They ship as a pair rather than one replacing the other: the full weights (6.7 GB) render shaded or densely drawn work far more photographically, while the lite weights (2.0 GB) hold bold sparse line art that the full weights flatten into a filled shape at any control strength. Draw dark lines on a lighter ground.
• Presets can declare a minimum generation size, and the Z_image_Turbo sketch presets declare 1024. Z_image_Turbo does not degrade gracefully below its native resolution — on a 447px document the same seed gave a maze-like texture at 448 and a clean portrait at 1024 — so those presets now render at the floor and scale the result back to your canvas.
• The Sketch to Image model dropdown refreshes for the selected preset. It never did: all three older presets read the same checkpoint list, so nobody noticed until a preset needed a different one.

Also new in v0.13.0-alpha:

• The Setup screen downloads missing models. A missing model's row offers Download beside Copy Link, and the panel fetches the file from the URL the registry pins — resumable, one model at a time, and never before a confirmation naming the size, the destination folder and the download host. Licence-gated weights and custom node packages are still yours to install; see the boundaries below.
• An optional LoRA on eleven presets, across Text to Image, Image to Image and Sketch to Image. One dropdown and one strength control per tool. Choosing nothing leaves the shipped workflow untouched — the loader is spliced into the graph only when you actually pick a LoRA.
• A Depth ControlNet Sketch to Image preset. LineArt and Scribble hold the drawn stroke; this one holds the scene's perspective, which is what you want when a generated element has to sit in an existing composite at the right camera angle. Needs one new ControlNet model, no new node package.
• Sketch to Image no longer ignores your sketch. Light-on-dark art and solid filled shapes produced a blank control image, so ControlNet had no signal and the preset quietly became plain text-to-image. Fixed, and both sketch preprocessors now run at 1024 instead of 512.
• The Flux.2 dev (GGUF) preset actually runs now. In v0.12.0 its model dropdown never listed a .gguf file and pressing Generate failed outright. Both were reported by a tester on the release.

Also new in v0.11.0-alpha:

• A Setup screen, on Home under Preferences. It lists every model file and custom node package the presets need, with the folder each one goes in, its size, what it unlocks, and whether it is installed, missing, or sitting in the wrong folder. It works with ComfyUI stopped — the list is static and the status is an overlay — because that is the state most people are in when they go looking for what to download.
• "What will run well" ranks the presets against the VRAM ComfyUI reports for your card: Comfortable, Tight, Will offload, or Not known. It rates on the largest single file in a preset's stack rather than the total, and says plainly that a stack too big for the card runs slower rather than failing.
• Presets are named for artists. Workflow Health shows "Krea-2 Turbo" and "Flux Fill" instead of the internal ids txt2img-krea2-turbo and inpaint-flux-fill-basic, and the status badge is now one squared label used on both screens.

Also new in v0.10.0-alpha:

• The plugin zip is built to the ZIP specification for the first time. Every release from v0.1.0 to v0.9.0-alpha stored entry paths with backslashes, which macOS unzip unpacks as a flat directory with no assets/ folder, so the panel could not render. If an earlier release gave you a blank panel on macOS, this was why — use this one.
• Check Workflow Health finds models that are in the wrong folder. When a preset's model is missing from the folder its loader reads, the report searches the other model folders and names where it found it, so "missing" and "downloaded, but one directory over" stop looking identical. It also names the repository that provides a missing custom node.
• Live Painting has a negative prompt and a round of interface fixes: the session buttons no longer touch, and both of its explanatory hints are readable instead of being cut off after their first clause. It remains experimental.

Also new in v0.9.0-alpha:

• Layer Tools, the eighth tool and the first that is not a generation. Export the active layer, the current selection, or the selection mask, either to a file you pick with a Photoshop save dialog or straight into ComfyUI's input folder where a workflow can reference it by name.
• Each tool's diagnostics line and error text now stay on that tool's screen. Settings remains the panel-wide log and still shows what every tool reported.

Also new in the 0.8 series:

• The separated OpenLayer Preview panel has its own Import buttons, so a result can be placed into the document from the large preview instead of only from the dashboard thumbnail. The buttons act on the image currently on screen, stay disabled during a run and on live sampler frames, and report the outcome on their own status line.
• img2img-z-image-turbo's editable source workflow is correct. It previously held the vendor's text-to-image demo graph, so opening it to learn the workflow showed a graph that cannot do image to image. Generation was never affected.
• The separated OpenLayer Preview panel can now stay pinned to one tool instead of always following the latest generation. Its selection persists across sessions.
• Status updates now stay with the correct tool instead of Text to Image progress appearing in Inpaint, Upscale, and the other tool screens.
• Technical error details no longer crash while explaining a failure, and the progress bar no longer paints over the first section of the form. The bar has moved out of the sticky header and back under the status text it describes, so nothing in the header changes size when a run starts.
• All four previously missing editable GUI source workflows are included, with a checker that compares every GUI source workflow with its API-format twin.
• ESLint now runs in CI and rejects browser globals such as TextEncoder and TextDecoder that Node provides but Photoshop UXP does not.
• App.ts has been reduced from 6,112 lines at v0.7.0 to 4,922 — down from a peak of 8,149 — by extracting error messages, status handling, and DOM event wiring. A separate CSS audit measures consolidation work without changing styles in this release.

Included in this alpha:

• Local ComfyUI connection from Photoshop UXP
• Checkpoint loading from ComfyUI
• Compact Adobe-style Home launcher with tool rows for current and planned workflows
• Settings theme selector with Compact Adobe Dark as the default and Classic v0.4 as an optional legacy visual style
• Text-to-image generation with the txt2img-basic preset
• Experimental Flux1-dev fp8 Text to Image preset using the attached checkpoint-style ComfyUI workflow
• Image-to-image generation with the img2img-basic preset
• Active Photoshop layer capture for Image to Image using Photoshop UXP Imaging API
• Canvas capture option for Image to Image source input
• Experimental Sketch to Image generation with the sketch2img-linecn-basic LINECN preset
• Active Photoshop layer or canvas capture for Sketch to Image source input
• ComfyUI setup validation for required LineArt/ControlNet nodes and models
• Experimental checkpoint mode with SD 1.x, SDXL, SD3, and Flux compatibility warnings
• Source image preview before upload to ComfyUI
• Result preview inside the OpenLayer panel
• Import generated output into the active Photoshop document as a new layer
• Settings persistence for ComfyUI URL, selected checkpoint, and generation defaults
• Passive local ComfyUI active port finder
• GPU-aware model recommendations in Settings using ComfyUI /system_stats
• Beginner-friendly model family guidance for SD 1.x, SDXL, SD3, Flux, and Z_image_Turbo
• Workflow compatibility foundation that separates checkpoint presets from future diffusion-model-stack presets
• Settings workflow health checker for registered presets, required ComfyUI node classes, and required model-stack files
• Readable Settings diagnostics center with grouped workflow health cards, collapsed technical details, summary counts, and Copy Diagnostics support
• Experimental Z_image_Turbo Text to Image and Image to Image presets using a dedicated diffusion-model-stack workflow path
• Global Cancel Generation button path for Text to Image, Image to Image, Sketch to Image, Inpaint, Outpaint, and Prompt from Layer using ComfyUI's local interrupt endpoint
• Prompt from Layer workflow using Florence-2 PromptGen to describe a captured layer or canvas when the local setup is installed
• Experimental Flux Fill Outpaint workflow using ImagePadForOutpaint
• FLUX.2 Klein 4B Text to Image, Image to Image, and instruction editing presets
• Context-aware Inpaint preset using ComfyUI-Inpaint-CropAndStitch for fixed 1024 sampling
• Image to Image Import Automatically toggle for sending generated results straight back into Photoshop
• Upscale screen using ComfyUI pixel/model upscale, not generative upscale
• upscale-basic workflow using LoadImage, UpscaleModelLoader, ImageUpscaleWithModel, and SaveImage
• PNG/lossless source capture for Image to Image and Sketch to Image using raw Photoshop Imaging API pixels
• Experimental Inpaint/Repaint Selection screen with safe Photoshop selection detection
• PNG/lossless selected-region capture and temporary-layer grayscale mask export for Inpaint
• Experimental SD 1.x inpaint-basic workflow with source image and mask upload to ComfyUI
• Friendly Inpaint guardrails when no Photoshop selection exists, mask export fails, or required ComfyUI inpaint nodes are unavailable
• Automated CI and unit test foundation for workflow, settings, model compatibility, and error helpers
• Session history for recent generated previews with prompt, model, workflow preset, seed, dimensions, source mode, tool type, timestamp, and import status where available
• Shared OpenLayer AI layer metadata model for generated/imported results, currently used by session history and prepared for future Photoshop layer persistence
• Best-effort Photoshop layer metadata writer with an explicit unsupported fallback when the host does not expose safe layer metadata persistence
• Reuse Settings action for recent generated-image history entries
• Optional auto-import after generation
• Responsive panel spacing fixes for narrow and wide Photoshop panels
• Official OpenLayer icon and GitHub Pages landing page

v0.6 interface

The v0.6 dashboard is denser, clearer about tool availability, and designed for narrow Photoshop panels. The accepted UXP layout adds sticky tool headers, determinate generation progress, larger prompt editors, and consistent spacing without changing the local workflow engine.

See the earlier dashboard design

The earlier card-based dashboard established OpenLayer's honest available/experimental/coming-soon model. v0.6 keeps that information architecture while using less space and fitting Photoshop more naturally.

v0.16.0-alpha tester focus:

• Confirm the panel footer reads v0.16.0. It read the wrong version for the whole of v0.14.0-alpha, so this is worth a glance before anything else.
• Switch to Artist-Friendly Dark in Settings. The panel should restyle into the softer dark theme. Switch back to Compact Adobe Dark and confirm it looks exactly as it did before — nothing about it should have changed.
• In Artist-Friendly Dark, confirm the numeric parameters are sliders. Drag Detail (steps) or Strength (denoise), confirm the number updates, and generate — the value the slider shows must be the value used. In Compact Adobe Dark the same parameters must still be number boxes.
• Press the dice button on a seed field. Each press should roll a different seed, and the field must never show 214748.36. Then load an entry from session History and generate from it — its seed must load and run, not fail with "Seed must be a whole number". That failure hit every History load before this release.
• Expand Advanced settings on one tool, collapse it on another, and reopen the panel. Each screen must remember what you left it as. Then Reset Settings — it must not re-collapse a screen you chose to keep open.
• Open Inpaint, make a selection, switch to inpaint-flux2-klein, and generate. Confirm the repaint blends into the surrounding image. It is strongest at adding something to a small selection — try that, and try replacing a larger region. It needs the comfyui-inpaint-cropandstitch node pack; if it is missing, Workflow Health should name it.

Also worth rechecking from v0.15.0-alpha:

• Generate with txt2img-flux2-klein. It should complete in under 15 seconds on a 4070 Ti at 1024x1024. Confirm the result is coherent and the prompt was followed.
• Open Image to Image, switch to img2img-flux2-klein, capture a layer, and generate. The result should follow your layer. Then switch to edit-flux2-klein, enter a change instruction ("make the sky orange"), and generate again — the edit should apply the instruction while keeping the rest of the scene.
• Open Inpaint, make a selection, and switch to inpaint-flux-fill-cropstitch. Generate and confirm the inpainted area blends into the surrounding image. Compare with inpaint-flux-fill-basic at the same selection — crop-and-stitch should produce sharper detail on small selections in large documents.
• Generate an Image to Image result from a layer that is not at the canvas origin, then import it. The imported layer must land where the source layer was, not centred on the canvas.
• Confirm ordinary use is unaffected if you never turn the Agent Bridge on. Text to Image gains one new button, "Ask the Agent for a Prompt" — clicking it with the bridge off should show a clear "not connected" status, not an error or a broken panel. Everything else should behave exactly as it did in v0.14. This is the most important check in the list: everything below is opt-in.
• Open Setup and find the Agent Bridge section at the bottom. With nothing running, press Turn Agent Bridge On — it must report that no bridge is listening and tell you how to start one, not hang or claim to be connected.
• Start the hub (cd bridge && npm install && npm run hub), then turn the toggle on. It should connect without any AI client running at all — the hub is independent of them.
• Register the bridge with Claude Code or Codex (bridge/README.md has the line), then ask it to call get_panel_state. It should report connected: true and list all seven tools.
• Ask it to generate something. The prompt should appear in the panel by itself and run exactly as if you had typed it. Then ask for a model or size it has not used — the panel's own dropdowns should follow.
• Start a generation by hand, and while it runs, ask the assistant to generate something. It must refuse with "OpenLayer is busy", not start a second run. This is the safety rule most worth confirming in the real app.
• Ask for one of the capture-based tools (Upscale, Inpaint, Image to Image) with nothing captured. It should come back with the same clear "capture a source first" refusal you would get from clicking Generate too early.
• Try Ask the Agent for a Prompt under the Text to Image prompt box. If your AI client supports MCP sampling it fills the box; if not it should refuse instantly with an explanation, and that refusal is the correct behaviour rather than a bug. Report which client you used either way — that answer is genuinely unknown for most clients.
• Close your AI client mid-generation. Photoshop should finish the job normally.

Also worth rechecking from v0.14.0-alpha:

• Open Sketch to Image and switch the Workflow dropdown to Z-Image Fun ControlNet Union (Lite). The Checkpoint dropdown must repopulate and offer z_image_turbo_bf16.safetensors.
• Draw with a pencil or soft brush on a toned or off-white background, not pure white, and generate with each Z-Image preset. The result must follow your drawing without your strokes appearing on the finished image.
• Generate from a small document, under 1024px on the long edge. The imported layer must come back at your canvas size and must not show a maze-like texture or bare glowing lines on black.

Also worth rechecking from v0.13.0-alpha:

• Open Text to Image, pick txt2img-krea2-turbo, and confirm a LoRA (optional) row appears with None selected and no strength field. Generate once with None — it must succeed — then pick a LoRA and generate again at the same seed. The two images must differ.
• Switch the Workflow dropdown across every preset in Text to Image, Image to Image and Sketch to Image and confirm the LoRA row appears for all of them. Confirm it does not appear on Inpaint, Outpaint or Upscale.
• Pick a LoRA whose name mentions a different model family than the preset. It should still be selectable, marked (name suggests another model), and generating should succeed with a visibly unchanged image — that is the silent failure the warning describes, not a bug.

Also worth rechecking from v0.11.0-alpha:

• Open Setup from Home before starting ComfyUI. Confirm every model and node package is still listed with its folder, size and links, that the three tallies show a dash rather than 0, and that nothing claims you are set up.

• Start ComfyUI, click Check Again, and confirm the list splits into what you have and what you are missing, with the installed rows collapsed. The remaining download figure should count each file once even though several presets share it — and should say "Nothing" if you have everything.

• Move one model into the wrong folder — a checkpoint into models/diffusion_models/, say — check again, and confirm its row says you already have the file, names the folder it is in, and does not add its size to the remaining download.

• Use the filter chips to narrow the list to one tool, and confirm the tallies and the download total keep describing everything rather than only the filtered slice.

• Read "What will run well" at the bottom of Setup. Confirm the VRAM figure matches your card, that the order runs best-first, and that the Florence-2 preset is not claimed to be the most comfortable one on the list.

• Look at the status badges on both Setup and Check Workflow Health: they should be the same squared uppercase label on both screens, with no text cut off by an ellipsis. The longest ones are NEEDS WORKFLOW JSON and MISSING COMFYUI NODE.

• Confirm the filter chips read as flat outlined pills of uniform height — not gold switches, not stretched ovals.

• Confirm Workflow Health names presets the way an artist would ("Krea-2 Turbo", "Standard checkpoint") rather than by their internal ids. Also worth rechecking from v0.10.0-alpha:

• Unzip the release package and confirm it expands into folders, with an assets/ directory beside index.html — not a flat pile of files with backslashes in their names. On macOS this is the single most useful thing to report.

• Put a model in the wrong folder on purpose — move a checkpoint into models/diffusion_models/, say — then run Check Workflow Health and confirm the report names the folder it actually found it in and the folder the workflow wants.

• Open Live Painting. Confirm Start and Stop Live Session have a gap between them and are the same height, and that the two explanatory hints read as full paragraphs rather than ending in an ellipsis.

• Set a Live Painting negative prompt, start a session, and paint. Then run one session with the field left blank and confirm it behaves as it did before.

Also worth rechecking from v0.9.0-alpha:

• Open Layer Tools from Home. With a layer selected, save it to a file, then send it to ComfyUI and confirm it appears in ComfyUI's input folder under the name the status line reports.
• Make a selection, then run both the Selection and Selection mask exports. The mask is the one an inpainting workflow wants; confirm it is a black-and-white image matching what you selected.
• Cancel a save dialog and confirm the status line says so without turning red — a change of mind is not an error.
• Run a Layer Tools export with no selection, and with no open document, and confirm the message names what you were trying to do.
• Open each tool in turn without touching anything and confirm its diagnostics line still shows its own opening hint. Then generate on Text to Image and confirm nothing from it appears on any other tool's screen.
• Open Plugins > OpenLayer Preview, generate, and import the result using the panel's own Import button. Confirm the layer lands in the same document the generation started from, and that the panel's status line reports what happened.
• Confirm the panel's Import button is disabled while a run is in progress and on live sampler frames, and enabled again once a result is committed.
• Open Plugins > OpenLayer Preview, pin it to one tool, generate with another, and confirm the panel stays pinned and restores that choice in a later session.
• Start Text to Image and confirm progress appears only in its own status bar; return Home and confirm the shared status row does not appear on tool screens.
• Watch a sticky tool header before and during a run. There should be no progress bar in the header at all, its height should not change, and the bar should appear under the status text in the generation status panel with nothing painted over it.
• Exercise an error path and open its technical details to confirm the original failure is reported without a second crash.
• Run npm run setup-pack and confirm it reports no source/API mismatches at all.
• Recheck the existing local generation, cancel, preview, import, History, and Workflow Health paths for regressions.

Known v0.16.0-alpha boundaries:

• The Agent Bridge is not in the .ccx/.zip download. A Photoshop plugin package cannot install or start a Node program, so it lives in the repository — see bridge/README.md. It is off by default in the panel either way. "Ask the Agent for a Prompt" additionally depends on your AI client supporting MCP sampling, which is optional in the protocol; a client that does not offer it gets a clear, instant refusal rather than the button working.
• The Setup screen downloads missing models, but not custom nodes. A missing model's row offers Download beside Copy Link, and OpenLayer fetches the file from the URL the registry pins — in resumable 8 MiB chunks, one model at a time, and never before a confirmation naming the size, the destination folder and the download host. What it will not do is unchanged and deliberate: licence-gated weights are never fetched anonymously, because an unauthenticated request saves an HTML sign-in page under the model's filename; a model already on disk in the wrong folder asks you to move it rather than downloading a second copy; and an entry published as a repository folder rather than a single file points you at the model page. Custom node packages keep Copy Link and go through ComfyUI-Manager. Full reasoning in the CHANGELOG.
• The Flux.2 GGUF preset is slow on a 12 GB card: minutes per image, not seconds, and its text encoder is licence-gated, so accept the licence in a browser and download it by hand.
• "What will run well" rates on published model weight sizes against reported VRAM. It is not a measurement of VRAM use during a run, and a preset with an unpublished model size is reported as unknown rather than guessed at.
• Setup and Check Workflow Health overlap on purpose. Setup answers what you need and where it goes; Health answers whether a given preset can run right now.
• Image to Image is an early foundation path, not a full production workflow yet.
• Sketch to Image has five presets: three SD 1.x ControlNets (LineArt, Scribble, Depth) and two Z_image_Turbo presets that read the sketch through Alibaba-PAI's Z-Image Fun ControlNet Union patch -- sketch2img-zimage-fun-controlnet (lite, 2.0 GB, faster) and sketch2img-zimage-fun-controlnet-full (6.7 GB, slower). Neither Z_image_Turbo preset replaced the other, because they measured as complementary rather than ranked: the full weights render shaded or densely drawn work more photographically, while the lite weights hold bold sparse line art that the full weights flatten into a filled shape at any control strength. Their default control strengths differ for the same reason -- 1.0 for lite, 0.6 for full, which patches five times as many layer blocks. The SD 1.x presets are tested with epicrealism_naturalSinRC1VAE.safetensors and their respective control_v11p_sd15_* ControlNets; the Z_image_Turbo presets with z_image_turbo_bf16.safetensors and, respectively, Z-Image-Turbo-Fun-Controlnet-Union-2.1-lite-2602-8steps.safetensors and Z-Image-Turbo-Fun-Controlnet-Union-2.1.safetensors.
• Active-layer and canvas capture now encode raw Photoshop Imaging API pixels as PNG/lossless source images.
• Inpaint can detect and capture the selected rectangular region as a PNG/lossless source image.
• Inpaint now attempts a temporary-layer grayscale PNG mask export and can run the experimental SD 1.x inpaint-basic workflow when ComfyUI has the required nodes.
• Inpainting is available for testing, but output quality and Photoshop alignment are not confirmed stable yet.
• Inpaint has three presets: inpaint-basic (SD 1.x), inpaint-flux-fill-basic (Flux Fill), and inpaint-flux-fill-cropstitch (Flux Fill with crop-and-stitch). The crop-and-stitch preset requires lquesada's comfyui-inpaint-cropandstitch custom-node package; without it the preset is unavailable and the original Flux Fill preset still works.
• img2img-basic is the default SD 1.x/SDXL preset. SD3, SD3.5, and Flux checkpoints remain visible but are marked experimental because they usually need dedicated future workflow presets.
• Z_image_Turbo presets are experimental and use UNETLoader, CLIPLoader, and VAELoader instead of the checkpoint loader.
• txt2img-flux1-dev-fp8 is an experimental checkpoint-style Flux Text to Image preset for flux1-dev-fp8.safetensors.
• FLUX.2 Klein presets (txt2img-flux2-klein, img2img-flux2-klein, edit-flux2-klein) use flux-2-klein-4b-fp8.safetensors (4.07 GB), qwen_3_4b.safetensors (8 GB, shared with Z_image_Turbo), and ae.safetensors (336 MB). Klein is Apache-2.0 and ungated. edit-flux2-klein is structurally different from image-to-image: it uses ReferenceLatent conditioning at denoise 1, not a starting latent at partial denoise.
• Full-precision Flux1-dev Text to Image and Image to Image presets have been removed rather than left disabled. The bf16 weight is 23.8 GB before its text encoders and VAE, which does not fit the 12 GB cards this project targets, and txt2img-flux1-dev-fp8 already covers Flux Text to Image. Every preset the panel lists is now one you can actually run.
• Cancel Generation uses ComfyUI's interrupt endpoint and stops OpenLayer watchers/polling for active generation tools, but cancellation cannot undo work ComfyUI already completed.
• The Settings workflow health checker reports local readiness, but it does not auto-fix missing models, missing nodes, or workflow mappings.
• Workflow Health now gives beginner-friendly next checks for missing models, missing ComfyUI nodes, missing workflow JSON, setup-required presets, and experimental presets.
• Persistent Photoshop layer metadata is not confirmed safe in this UXP environment yet. OpenLayer keeps structured metadata in session history and prepares a serialized payload for future persistence.
• Copy Diagnostics prepares a setup report for testers. It does not send data anywhere.
• Prompt from Layer requires comfyui-florence2 and Florence-2-base-PromptGen-v2.0. The comfyui-custom-scripts pack is no longer needed.
• Outpaint is experimental and currently uses outpaint-flux-fill-basic with flux1-fill-dev.safetensors, clip_l.safetensors, t5xxl_fp16.safetensors or the accepted T5 fp8 fallback, and ae.safetensors.
• Upscale currently uses a simple pixel/model upscale path. It does not use prompts, latent upscale, tiled diffusion, or creative enhancement.
• Upscale needs ComfyUI's UpscaleModelLoader and ImageUpscaleWithModel nodes plus an installed upscale model such as 4x-UltraSharp.pth or RealESRGAN_x4plus.pth.
• The setup pack contains no model weights. They are roughly 85 GB and two are licence-restricted, so it ships the requirements list and a downloader instead. An internet connection is required.
• Inpaint and Outpaint remain experimental and should be tested on duplicate layers or disposable documents.
• CI covers pure TypeScript behavior but does not run Photoshop, UXP Developer Tool, or ComfyUI integration tests.
• Panel-wide diagnostics such as the port scan, the GPU report, and workflow health are reported on the Settings screen rather than on every tool screen. Each tool's own diagnostics line also mirrors to Settings, which is the panel-wide log.
• Progress is no longer pinned while a tool's form is scrolled, which is the accepted cost of taking the progress bar out of the sticky header.
• The 0.8 releases focus on correctness and maintainability. Existing generation capabilities should remain compatible with v0.7.0.
• The Preview panel offers each tool's primary import only. Live Painting's "Import Refined as Layer" stays on the dashboard.
• Layer, canvas, selection, and mask capture is limited to 16 megapixels (4096 x 4096) until a downscale option is added.
• Layer Tools' Send to ComfyUI puts the image in ComfyUI's input folder. It does not build or run a workflow for you — you reference the uploaded file from a workflow yourself.
• The Layer Tools card on Home does not dim when ComfyUI is unreachable, unlike the generation tools. Saving to a file still works with ComfyUI stopped; Send to ComfyUI reports the connection error on the Layer Tools status line.
• Live sampler previews require ComfyUI to be started with --preview-method auto, and the preview panel may flicker between steps until a future UI polish pass.
• Classic v0.4 theme preserves the older visual feel, but it does not duplicate every old layout detail.
• SDXL, SD3, and Flux Sketch to Image workflows still need dedicated future presets.
• Workflow node IDs may need adjustment for custom ComfyUI workflows.
• Dedicated selected-layer PNG file export, selection preservation, aligned regional workflows, advanced ControlNet-style workflows, and generative upscaling are not included yet.
• The UI is functional and responsive enough for testing, but final visual polish will continue in later releases.

Project Page

The static landing page is in:

docs/index.html

For GitHub Pages, publish from the docs folder on the main branch.

Model And VRAM Guide

OpenLayer includes a beginner-friendly guide for local model choices, VRAM tiers, and why diffusion model stacks such as Z_image_Turbo do not appear in the checkpoint selector:

docs/model-guide.md

The current experimental inpainting status and next debugging checklist are documented in:

docs/inpainting.md

Key technical decisions for the project are tracked in:

docs/technical-decisions.md

MVP Status

Working foundation:

• Photoshop UXP panel scaffold for Photoshop 2024+
• Dark, minimal UXP-friendly TypeScript UI
• Photoshop-dark Home dashboard with Text to Image, Image to Image, Sketch to Image, Inpaint, Prompt from Layer, Settings, History, and future workflow cards
• Experimental Outpaint card and screen for Flux Fill canvas expansion testing
• Configurable local ComfyUI server URL
• ComfyUI connection check
• Checkpoint/model selector loaded from ComfyUI
• Settings page with saved local defaults and diagnostics
• Settings hardware advisor for detecting ComfyUI GPU/VRAM and recommending safe model families
• Session history for recent generated images
• txt2img-basic workflow generation
• Experimental txt2img-z-image-turbo workflow generation
• img2img-basic workflow generation foundation
• Experimental img2img-z-image-turbo workflow generation foundation
• sketch2img-linecn-basic Sketch to Image generation foundation
• Experimental prompt-from-layer-florence2 text workflow with Task and Num beams controls
• Experimental upscale-basic pixel/model upscale workflow
• Active-layer or visible-canvas source capture and ComfyUI image upload
• Experimental Inpaint/Repaint Selection screen with Photoshop selection detection, selected-region PNG source capture, grayscale mask export, and SD 1.x inpaint-basic
• Experimental checkpoint mode for trying non-SD/SDXL model families with clear warnings
• /prompt submission
• /history/{prompt_id} polling
• /view image retrieval
• Result preview in the panel
• Import result into the active Photoshop document as a new layer

Future placeholders are included for regional import alignment and selection preservation.

Requirements

To use the plugin:

• Adobe Photoshop 2024 or newer
• Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app, to install the .ccx by double-click
• A local ComfyUI server for OpenLayer running at http://127.0.0.1:8190

To build from source instead:

• Adobe UXP Developer Tool
• Node.js 18+

The UXP Developer Tool is no longer needed just to run OpenLayer — see One-click install.

Local Permissions

OpenLayer is local-first. The Photoshop UXP manifest currently requests filesystem and network access because:

• local filesystem access is used for temporary files and Photoshop import tokens
• network access is used to communicate with the user's local ComfyUI server
• Copy Diagnostics prepares a local text report only

OpenLayer does not send diagnostics, images, prompts, or model information anywhere automatically.

Install

npm install

Development

Build the plugin:

npm run build

Load the generated dist folder in Adobe UXP Developer Tool.

Run local checks:

npm run typecheck
npm test

These checks do not require Photoshop or ComfyUI.

For fast UI iteration outside Photoshop, you can run:

npm run dev

The dev server is useful for panel layout work, but the Photoshop-specific APIs only run inside Photoshop through UXP.

Package

npm run package

This creates a zip package from dist in the packages folder. For the current alpha, the expected package name is:

packages/openlayer-v0.16.0-alpha.zip

npm run package also writes packages/openlayer-v0.16.0-alpha.ccx beside it, from the same files.

One-click install (verified 2026-08-03)

Every release attaches a .ccx. Double-click it and Creative Cloud installs the panel — no UXP Developer Tool, no developer mode. Photoshop then lists it under Plugins > OpenLayer like any other installed plugin.

This was an open question across three releases and is now answered. What was checked, on Windows 11 with Photoshop 2025 (26.1.0): the package installs, Adobe's Unified Plugin Installer Agent reports it as Enabled OpenLayer 0.13.0 under Photoshop 2025 64, it unpacks to %APPDATA%\Adobe\UXP\Plugins\External\com.openlayer.photoshop_<version>\ with no debug.json — a packaged install rather than a developer load — and the panel opens and works in Photoshop.

Two things worth knowing before you try it:

• The plugin is not signed and not from Adobe Exchange, so Creative Cloud shows a "not verified by Adobe" trust prompt. That is expected; it is a prompt to click through, not a failure.
• Keep the .ccx on the same drive as Photoshop and Creative Cloud. The installer only searches the drive the file is sitting on, so a .ccx on D: with Photoshop on C: fails.

If double-clicking does nothing at all — a known Windows 11 quirk where Creative Cloud opens with no progress and no error — install it directly instead:

"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Adobe Desktop Common\RemoteComponents\UPI\UnifiedPluginInstallerAgent\UnifiedPluginInstallerAgent.exe" /install "path\to\openlayer-vX.Y.Z-alpha.ccx"

UnifiedPluginInstallerAgent.exe /list all shows what is installed, and /remove OpenLayer uninstalls it. Note that /list needs all or the exact product display name ("Photoshop 2025 64"); a partial name like "Photoshop" prints nothing and no error, which looks exactly like "nothing installed".

Still unverified: macOS, and any Photoshop other than 2025. Reports either way are welcome.

The UXP Developer Tool route below still works and is what you want when building from source.

Loading In UXP Developer Tool

1. Open Adobe UXP Developer Tool.
2. Click Add Plugin.
3. Select dist/manifest.json after running npm run build.
4. Click Load.
5. Open Photoshop and find OpenLayer in the Plugins panel.

Starting ComfyUI

Start ComfyUI locally using your normal ComfyUI launch command. Confirm the server is reachable:

curl http://127.0.0.1:8190/system_stats

In OpenLayer, keep the default server URL or enter your own:

http://127.0.0.1:8190

OpenLayer uses port 8190 by default so it does not interfere with another tool that may already be using ComfyUI on port 8188.

You do not have to move your server to 8190. If ComfyUI is already running somewhere else — 8188 or anywhere — open Settings and click Find ComfyUI Active Port. OpenLayer scans for the running server, connects to it, and reports Ready. Use your normal launch command and leave it where it is.

Starting a dedicated instance on 8190 is the other option, not the required one:

python main.py --listen 127.0.0.1 --port 8190 --preview-method auto

--preview-method auto is optional but recommended: it makes ComfyUI stream live KSampler step previews into the OpenLayer result preview while generating.

Click Check ComfyUI before generating.

First Image

1. Open a Photoshop document.
2. Open the OpenLayer panel.
3. Open Settings and click Find ComfyUI Active Port or Check ComfyUI to load the available checkpoints.
4. Optional: click Detect GPU & Recommend Models to see hardware-aware model suggestions.
5. Choose a checkpoint.
6. Enter a prompt.
7. Optionally enter a negative prompt.
8. Keep the workflow preset set to txt2img-basic.
9. Click Generate.
10. Wait for the preview.
11. Click Import Result as New Layer, or enable Import Result Automatically before generating.

The imported layer is named like:

OpenLayer_Generated_YYYYMMDD_HHMM

First Image To Image Test

1. Open a Photoshop document.
2. Select the layer you want to use as the source.
3. Open the OpenLayer panel and choose Image to Image.
4. Click Capture Active Layer, or click Capture Canvas to use the visible document.
5. Confirm the source preview appears.
6. Enter a prompt describing how to reinterpret the source.
7. Choose a checkpoint and keep the workflow set to img2img-basic.
8. Click Generate Image to Image.
9. Wait for the result preview.
10. Click Import to Layers.

The imported layer is named like:

OpenLayer_Img2Img_YYYYMMDD_HHMM

First Sketch To Image LINECN Test

1. Install or confirm this SD 1.x checkpoint is available in ComfyUI:

epicrealism_naturalSinRC1VAE.safetensors

2. Install or confirm this SD 1.5 LineArt ControlNet model is available in ComfyUI:

control_v11p_sd15_lineart_fp16.safetensors

3. Open a Photoshop document with a visible source layer or canvas.
4. Open the OpenLayer panel and choose Sketch to Image.
5. Click Capture Active Layer, or click Capture Canvas.
6. Confirm the source preview appears.
7. Enter a prompt describing the final image.
8. Keep the workflow set to sketch2img-linecn-basic.
9. Choose epicrealism_naturalSinRC1VAE.safetensors.
10. Click Generate Sketch to Image.
11. Wait for the result preview.
12. Click Import to Layers.

The imported layer is named like:

OpenLayer_Sketch_YYYYMMDD_HHMM

First Inpaint Test

This alpha includes the first experimental SD 1.x mask-based inpainting path.

1. Open a Photoshop document.
2. Make a rectangular or freeform selection in Photoshop.
3. Open the OpenLayer panel and choose Inpaint.
4. Click Capture Selection.
5. Confirm the source preview appears and the status shows the selection bounds.
6. Confirm the mask preview appears as a black/white PNG mask.
7. Enter a prompt and click Generate Inpaint.
8. Wait for the result preview.
9. Click Import to Layers.

The first inpaint-basic preset is experimental and intended for SD 1.x inpaint checkpoints first. inpaint-flux-fill-basic is also available as an experimental Flux Fill path when your local ComfyUI exposes the required Flux Fill model stack. inpaint-flux-fill-cropstitch adds crop-and-stitch sampling at 1024 on top of the same Flux Fill stack, and needs lquesada's comfyui-inpaint-cropandstitch node package.

Inpaint output quality, mask interpretation, and Photoshop alignment are still being tested. Use this path for debugging and feedback rather than production work.

Pre-release Tester Checklist

Use this quick pass before reporting a v0.16.0-alpha test result:

1. Start ComfyUI on http://127.0.0.1:8190.
2. Build OpenLayer and load dist/manifest.json in Adobe UXP Developer Tool.
3. Open Photoshop, create or open a document, and launch OpenLayer.
4. Confirm unavailable dashboard tools are visibly dimmer than available and experimental tools.
5. Open two tool screens; confirm the Back to Tools control, icon, title, and progress track have clear spacing and remain visible while scrolling.
6. Paste a long prompt, confirm it remains editable and scrollable, and confirm the Prompt from Layer generated-text field is substantially taller than other fields.
7. Open Settings and click Check ComfyUI; confirm checkpoints load.
8. Click Check Workflow Health; confirm each registered preset shows Ready, Experimental, Missing model, Missing ComfyUI node, Needs workflow JSON, or Setup required, under its artist-facing name.
9. Confirm Settings shows readable summary counts and collapsed technical details without overlapping cards.
10. Click Copy Diagnostics; confirm the report is copied or appears in the read-only diagnostics box.
11. Generate one txt2img-basic image and import it as a new layer; confirm the determinate progress bar advances cleanly.
12. Select txt2img-flux1-dev-fp8 with flux1-dev-fp8.safetensors if available, generate once, and confirm the result preview appears.
13. Start one Text to Image generation and click Cancel Generation; confirm the status changes to Generation cancelled. and the next generation still works.
14. Open Image to Image, capture either the active layer or canvas, generate with img2img-basic, and click Import to Layers.
15. Toggle Image to Image Import Automatically, generate once, and confirm the result imports as a new Photoshop layer.
16. Open Upscale, capture either the active layer or canvas, choose 4x-UltraSharp.pth or another listed upscale model, generate, and click Import to Layers.
17. Open Sketch to Image, capture either the active layer or canvas, generate with sketch2img-linecn-basic, and click Import to Layers.
18. Open Inpaint, make a Photoshop selection, click Capture Selection, and confirm the selected-region preview and mask preview appear.
19. Generate with inpaint-flux-fill-basic if your Flux Fill stack is installed, then click Import to Layers; keep inpaint-basic as experimental/debug-only if it does not match the source.
20. Start and cancel one longer Image to Image, Sketch, Outpaint, Inpaint, Prompt from Layer, or Upscale run if your ComfyUI setup supports it; confirm the next generation still works.
21. Open History after a generation; confirm prompt, model, workflow, seed, dimensions, source mode, tool type, timestamp, import status, Preview, Import, and Reuse Settings are visible.
22. Resize the panel narrow and wide; confirm Settings, workflow health cards, buttons, preview, and footer remain readable and reachable.

Testing Checklist

For a step-by-step beginner smoke test, see:

docs/testing-v0.1-alpha.md

Workflow Notes

The included workflows are realistic starter ComfyUI workflows using common built-in nodes:

• src/workflows/api/txt2img-basic.json
• src/workflows/api/txt2img-flux1-dev-fp8.json
• src/workflows/api/prompt-from-layer-florence2.json
• src/workflows/api/img2img-basic.json
• src/workflows/api/sketch2img-linecn-basic.json
• src/workflows/api/inpaint-basic.json
• src/workflows/api/inpaint-flux-fill-basic.json

You may need to replace the checkpoint name and node IDs for your own ComfyUI setup.

OpenLayer now keeps workflow files in two folders:

• src/workflows/api/ for runnable API workflows submitted to ComfyUI
• src/workflows/source/ for GUI-editable ComfyUI source workflows

See docs/workflow-files.md, docs/custom-workflows.md, and docs/comfyui-object-info-audit-v0.2.2.md for the workflow file structure, custom workflow mapping requirements, and the local node schema audit used by the workflow compatibility foundation.

The workflow builder injects:

• prompt
• negative prompt
• width
• height
• seed
• steps
• cfg

Image to Image and Sketch to Image use Photoshop's UXP Imaging API to capture the active layer or canvas, encode the raw pixels as PNG, then send the source image to ComfyUI using /upload/image. JPEG source capture has been removed from this path so clean edges, masks, transparency, and linework are not degraded by lossy compression.

Inpaint uses the same PNG/lossless Imaging API path, clipped to a padded context around the active Photoshop selection when Photoshop exposes selection bounds. In v0.4.1-alpha, OpenLayer also creates a temporary white-filled selection layer, captures it as a grayscale PNG mask, deletes the temporary layer, and uploads both source and mask to ComfyUI.

The first inpaint-basic preset requires ComfyUI's standard LoadImage, ImageToMask, InpaintModelConditioning, KSampler, VAEDecode, ImageCompositeMasked, and SaveImage nodes. It is currently aimed at SD 1.x inpaint checkpoints.

The experimental inpaint-flux-fill-basic preset requires:

• flux1-fill-dev.safetensors through UNETLoader from models/diffusion_models
• clip_l.safetensors through DualCLIPLoader.clip_name1 from models/text_encoders
• t5xxl_fp16.safetensors through DualCLIPLoader.clip_name2 from models/text_encoders
• t5xxl_fp8_e4m3fn.safetensors as an accepted T5 fallback when the fp16 file is not installed
• ae.safetensors through VAELoader from models/vae
• DifferentialDiffusion, FluxGuidance, ConditioningZeroOut, InpaintModelConditioning, KSampler, VAEDecode, and SaveImage

Flux Fill follows the reference-style graph in src/workflows/source/inpaint-flux-fill-basic.workflow.json. That graph expects one LoadImage node whose alpha channel becomes the mask. OpenLayer preserves the Photoshop source PNG and embeds the white repaint mask into the uploaded PNG alpha channel before submission. Inpaint import currently uses aligned context import only. The earlier transparent outside-mask PNG experiment is disabled because Photoshop UXP canvas/blob compositing is not trusted yet. Output quality, mask polarity, and alignment are not confirmed stable yet, and Photoshop-native layer mask import remains planned future work.

For debugging, OpenLayer records source, mask, raw result dimensions, import mode, and temporary local debug copies of the source PNG, mask PNG, and raw generated PNG after an Inpaint run.

img2img-basic is intended for SD 1.x and SDXL-style checkpoints. SD3, SD3.5, and Flux checkpoints are shown in the selector for transparency, but OpenLayer warns before running them because those model families often need different loader, text encoder, and VAE nodes.

Sketch to Image uses the same Photoshop capture and ComfyUI upload path, then runs sketch2img-linecn-basic. This preset requires:

• epicrealism_naturalSinRC1VAE.safetensors
• control_v11p_sd15_lineart_fp16.safetensors
• LineartStandardPreprocessor
• ControlNetLoader
• ControlNetApplyAdvanced

The first LINECN preset is intentionally narrow. It is a working SD 1.x foundation, not a universal sketch workflow for SDXL, SD3, Flux, or Z_image_Turbo.

If you export a different workflow from ComfyUI, update the node IDs in src/comfy/presetRegistry.ts.

Troubleshooting

GitHub Pages shows 404

Make sure GitHub Pages is configured to publish from:

main / docs

The landing page entry file is docs/index.html.

Plugin does not appear in Photoshop

Run npm run build, then load:

dist/manifest.json

in Adobe UXP Developer Tool. After loading, open Photoshop and use the Plugins menu to open OpenLayer.

The panel opens but ComfyUI does not connect

Confirm ComfyUI is running on:

http://127.0.0.1:8190

You can test it in a browser or terminal:

curl http://127.0.0.1:8190/system_stats

If another local tool is already using 8188, keep OpenLayer on 8190 and start a separate ComfyUI instance for OpenLayer.

Checkpoint list is empty

Click Check ComfyUI after ComfyUI is fully started. If it is still empty, confirm your models are installed in ComfyUI and that the server URL in OpenLayer matches the running ComfyUI port.

Generate fails

Check that the selected checkpoint exists in ComfyUI and that the selected workflow node IDs still match the starter workflow. Custom workflows currently require manual mapping in:

src/comfy/presetRegistry.ts

See docs/custom-workflows.md for the current custom workflow process.

Image to Image fails with a model mismatch

Use an SD 1.x or SDXL checkpoint with img2img-basic first. If you select SD3, SD3.5, Flux, or another newer model family, OpenLayer will keep it visible but warn that it is experimental for this preset. Those checkpoints usually need a dedicated workflow preset before they can run reliably.

Import Result as New Layer fails

Open a Photoshop document before importing. OpenLayer imports into the active document and will show an error if no document is open.

Project Structure

.
|-- docs/
|-- scripts/
|-- src/
|   |-- comfy/
|   |-- photoshop/
|   |-- ui/
|   |-- utils/
|   |-- workflows/
|   |-- index.html
|   |-- main.ts
|   |-- manifest.json
|   `-- styles.css
|-- package.json
|-- tsconfig.json
`-- vite.config.ts

License

MIT

OpenLayer™ — the OpenLayer name and logo may not be used by derivative works without permission.