Qwen-Image 2.1 inside Photoshop: OpenLayer, a free local ComfyUI plugin

Qwen-Image 2.1 came out on September 20, and OpenLayer v0.35 puts it inside Photoshop. OpenLayer is a free, open-source Photoshop plugin (a UXP panel) that runs your own local ComfyUI: you prompt in Photoshop, and the result comes back as a real, editable layer. No cloud, no subscription, and nothing leaves your machine.

Transparent layers straight from the model. Pick the Qwen-Image 2.1 preset in Text to Image and switch on Transparent Background. You get a cut-out with a real alpha channel, generated that way rather than matted afterwards. This teapot came back 69% fully clear, with a clean hole through the handle and a soft contact shadow:

Instruction editing. In Image to Image, write what should change, like "make the teapot cobalt blue". Objects stay within a pixel of where they were, and when you edit a cut-out you get a cut-out back:

Multi-Reference. Name your layers in the prompt as <image1>, <image2> and so on, up to six. Here: "The person from <image2> holds the teapot from <image3> in <image1>".

Lettering that comes out spelled right, at native 2048 x 2048, handwriting included:

The licence, stated plainly: Qwen-Image 2.1's weights are under the Qwen Research License, which means research and evaluation only, not commercial work. So all three 2.1 presets are opt-in, never the default, and labelled "(research licence)". For paid work, the panel also has Apache-2.0 models such as FLUX.2 Klein 4B.

Setup and speed: ComfyUI 0.37+ and three files (14.2 GB), core nodes only. On a 12 GB RTX 4070 Ti, about 15-20 s per 1024 image, 86 s at 2048, and about 25 s per edit.

Also in the panel: text, image and sketch to image, inpaint, outpaint, upscale, live painting, Remove Background, Layer Maps (depth, line art, normal), Style Reference and Unflatten.

Free, MIT-licensed and open source: https://github.com/MehranMarxian/OpenLayer

Still alpha. Bug reports and your GPU timings are very welcome on GitHub.