OpenLayer

Alpha v0.41.0 · testers wanted

Five minutes to
your first AI layer.

OpenLayer is an alpha. It works on the author's machine, and that is exactly the problem — one machine, one GPU, one Photoshop install. What it needs now is the five minutes between downloading it and getting one generated layer into a document, and an honest report of where those five minutes went wrong.

Download v0.41.0-alpha Send a tester report
  • ~5 minutes
  • No account needed beyond GitHub
  • Nothing is uploaded from the plugin
  • Failures are the useful reports

Before you start

What you need on the machine.

Photoshop 2024 or newer (the plugin manifest requires host version 25.0.0) and a running ComfyUI with at least one SD 1.x or SDXL checkpoint installed. No developer tools — installing is a double-click now. If you do not have a checkpoint yet, you no longer have to go and find one: the panel's Setup screen lists every model the presets need and downloads it for you, one at a time and resumable, after a confirmation naming the file size, the folder it lands in, and the host it comes from. Licence-gated weights and custom node packages are the exceptions and stay manual — the screen says which is which. The setup pack attached to the release carries the same list if you would rather download by hand.

The five-minute path

Install, connect, generate, import, report.

1

Install OpenLayer

Download openlayer-v0.41.0-alpha.ccx from the release and double-click it. Creative Cloud installs the panel — no developer tool, nothing to unzip. Creative Cloud will warn that this file is not verified by Adobe, because it is not the Exchange build; that prompt is expected. You can also install the Adobe-approved version from the Adobe Exchange listing with one click; it can trail this release. Keep the file on the same drive as Photoshop. Then open Photoshop: Plugins > OpenLayer.

If double-clicking does nothing at all — a known Windows 11 quirk — the release also has openlayer-v0.41.0-alpha.zip, which loads through the UXP Developer Tool: Add Plugin, select the unzipped manifest.json, then Load. And if that is what you had to do, please say so in your report — the one-click path has only ever been verified on Windows 11 with Photoshop 2025.

2

Connect ComfyUI

Start ComfyUI however you normally do — you do not need to move it to any particular port. In OpenLayer, open Settings and click Find ComfyUI Active Port: it finds the running server on whatever port it is on, connects, and reports Ready. (Check ComfyUI tests the configured port directly if you already know it.) Your checkpoints should appear.

Already testing on 8190? The default is now 8188 — ComfyUI's own default. Your saved address still wins, so nothing should change; if it does, Find ComfyUI Active Port fixes it in one click and 8190 is still scanned.

3

Generate one image

Open a document in Photoshop. In OpenLayer go to Text to Image, pick a checkpoint, type any prompt, and click Generate. Leave every other setting alone.

4

Import one layer

When the result appears, click Import to Layers. A new layer should land in the document you started from. That single layer is the whole test.

5

Send the report

Open the tester report form and fill it in — whether you got the layer or not. In Settings, Copy Diagnostics fills in most of the technical fields for you.

Stop wherever it breaks and report from there. A report that says "step 2, Check ComfyUI never returned" is more useful than a completed run, because the failure is the thing that cannot be reproduced on the author's machine.

What to report

Specifics, not opinions.

"What do you think?" produces answers nobody can act on. The form asks for these instead, and every field exists because it has already explained a real bug — a model in the wrong folder, a port collision, a mask read from the wrong layer.

Your setup

  • Operating system
  • Photoshop version
  • GPU and VRAM
  • ComfyUI version
  • OpenLayer version
  • Workflow preset used
  • Model / checkpoint

What happened

  • Did installation succeed?
  • Did generation succeed?
  • Did the Photoshop import succeed?
  • Which stage failed, if any: install, ComfyUI connection, generation, preview, or import
  • How many minutes from opening these instructions to a layer in your document

What it felt like

  • The first moment you were confused
  • One feature you expected and could not find
  • Would you use it again?

Privacy

The plugin sends nothing anywhere.

OpenLayer has no telemetry, no analytics, and no crash reporting. It talks to your ComfyUI server and to nothing else. Copy Diagnostics prepares a text report locally and puts it on your clipboard — you read it, you decide what to paste, and you can delete anything you would rather not share. Everything the project knows about how testing went is what testers choose to send.

Ready?

Download the build, spend five minutes, and tell us where it went wrong. If you would rather talk it through than file a report, the discussion board has a Setup Help category.

Download v0.41.0-alpha Open discussions