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OpenLayer v0.12.0-alpha

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@MehranMarxian MehranMarxian released this 01 Aug 15:10
v0.12.0-alpha
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Learn about vigilant mode.

OpenLayer is a Photoshop UXP panel that drives your own local ComfyUI server. Nothing is uploaded anywhere: the plugin talks to 127.0.0.1 and to your document, and to nothing else.

This is an alpha. Become a tester — the page explains what feedback is most useful and where to file it.

Assisted install was planned for this release and is withheld. It was built on the belief that ComfyUI-Manager's install endpoint would fetch a given URL on request; testing found it will not — it only accepts models already in its own curated catalogue, on its own terms. Nothing was removed to fix this: the Setup screen still reports and copies exactly as it did in v0.11.0, and the plan/refusal logic that was right stays in the code for the version that replaces the download path. Full reasoning under Known limitations.

Install

  1. Start ComfyUI however you normally do. OpenLayer defaults to http://127.0.0.1:8190 so it does not collide with another tool already using 8188 — but you do not have to move your server. If ComfyUI is already running anywhere, open Settings and click Find ComfyUI Active Port: OpenLayer finds the running server, connects, and reports Ready. If you would rather give OpenLayer its own instance: 
    python main.py --listen 127.0.0.1 --port 8190 --preview-method auto
    --preview-method auto is optional and streams live sampler previews into the panel.
  2. Download openlayer-v0.12.0-alpha.ccx and double-click it. Creative Cloud installs the panel. Nothing to unzip, no developer tool. It will warn that the plugin is not verified by Adobe — expected, since this is not from Adobe Exchange. Keep the file on the same drive as Photoshop, or the installer will not find it.
  3. In Photoshop: Plugins > OpenLayer. Open Setup from Home first — it will tell you what you still need before you try to generate anything.

openlayer-comfyui-setup-0.12.0.zip is optional and separate. It contains the workflow JSONs, the model list with download URLs and target folders, and a downloader script — no model weights (they are ~120 GB and four are licence-restricted). It is generated from the same registry the Setup screen reads, so the two agree by construction.

Update 2026-08-03: the one-click install works

This release originally shipped the .ccx untested, saying nobody knew whether it worked and asking for a machine that had never had the UXP Developer Tool on it. That framing was wrong, and it is worth saying why, because it held the feature back for three releases.

.ccx files install through Adobe's Unified Plugin Installer Agent, not through the UXP Developer Tool. Developer mode only ever gated UDT loading unpackaged plugins — it never gated this path. So the question was answerable on an ordinary development machine the whole time.

Verified on Windows 11 with Photoshop 2025 (26.1.0): double-clicking openlayer-v0.12.0-alpha.ccx installs the panel through Creative Cloud, it registers as Enabled OpenLayer 0.12.0, it unpacks to %APPDATA%\Adobe\UXP\Plugins\External\com.openlayer.photoshop_0.12.0\ as a packaged install rather than a developer load, and the panel opens and runs in Photoshop.

Two caveats that are not failures:

  • Creative Cloud shows a "not verified by Adobe" prompt, because the package is unsigned and not from Exchange. Click through it.
  • The .ccx must be on the same drive as Photoshop and Creative Cloud. The installer only searches the drive the file is on.

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:

"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Adobe Desktop Common\RemoteComponents\UPI\UnifiedPluginInstallerAgent\UnifiedPluginInstallerAgent.exe" /install "path\to\openlayer-v0.12.0-alpha.ccx"

Still unverified: macOS, and any Photoshop other than 2025. Those reports are genuinely useful. The zip plus UXP Developer Tool route still works and is what you want if you build from source — it is documented in the README.

Tested versions

Two different claims here, and it is worth keeping them apart.

What the plugin requires: Photoshop 2024 or newer — the manifest declares minVersion 25.0.0. Windows or macOS, Node.js 18+ only if you build from source rather than using the zip. Note that 2024 is a declared floor: development happens on Photoshop 2025, and no build of 2024 has been run against this plugin. If you are on 2024 and it works, or doesn't, that is worth a report.

What was actually verified before this release, on the author's single machine — everything else is untested, not known-broken:
OS Windows 11 Pro (build 26200)
GPU NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti, 12 GB VRAM
RAM 31.7 GB
ComfyUI 0.29.2 (frontend v1.47.11), launched with --disable-xformers --preview-method auto
ComfyUI-Manager V3.41
Python 3.10.11
PyTorch 2.6.0+cu124
Photoshop 2025, build 26.1.0

ComfyUI moved from 0.27.1 to 0.29.2 since v0.11.0-alpha's table — re-queried live for this release, not carried forward. macOS has never been tested. The zip is built to the ZIP specification and was verified by reading this release's own published archive — see the checksums and the entry count below — but nobody has run this plugin on a Mac at all. If you do, that report is genuinely valuable either way.

Automated CI covers pure TypeScript logic only. It does not run Photoshop, UXP, or ComfyUI, so everything host-facing in this release was checked by hand on the machine above.

Checksums (SHA-256)

Also attached as checksums.txt in sha256sum format.

dcfc29c92219191f47a83152381bccd45bfd32b8523d02ce58e74a6ff2319b19  openlayer-v0.12.0-alpha.zip
b9bdaaafc7d0e9a81261e9accb027a59cba9ee568768f8f7de879a2234fcef9b  openlayer-comfyui-setup-0.12.0.zip
16f89df2013fa4a4ae497188308cc9c32f3c2cba932f61dd4fb743ae81208452  openlayer-v0.12.0-alpha.ccx

Verify on Windows PowerShell:

Get-FileHash openlayer-v0.12.0-alpha.zip -Algorithm SHA256

On macOS or Linux:

shasum -a 256 -c checksums.txt

What's new

v0.12.0-alpha - 2026-08-01

Two things for people running Flux: a Text to Image preset for the GGUF-quantised FLUX.2-dev, and the end of a long-standing embarrassment — every preset the panel lists is now one you can actually run, because the two that never could have been are gone rather than still promising a workflow that was never coming.

Assisted install was meant to be the headline here and is withheld from this release. It was built against an assumption about ComfyUI-Manager that turned out to be wrong, the defect was found in testing rather than by a user, and the honest fix is a different download path rather than a patch. The reasoning is under Known limitations, in full, because a feature that quietly disappears between releases is worse than one that explains itself.

Added

  • A Flux.2 dev (GGUF) Text to Image preset, for flux2-dev-Q4_K_M.gguf through ComfyUI-GGUF's UnetLoaderGGUF. The graph is the Flux.2 template ComfyUI itself ships, read directly rather than reconstructed from documentation. It is the first OpenLayer preset built on the advanced sampler chain — RandomNoise, KSamplerSelect, Flux2Scheduler and BasicGuider feeding SamplerCustomAdvanced — instead of a plain KSampler, and it has no negative prompt because the reference graph has no negative conditioning node, so that control is hidden rather than wired to something that would quietly do nothing. Marked experimental; see the boundaries below for what it costs to run.
  • Setup knows about ComfyUI-GGUF, which fails in a way that looks like nothing at all: it needs a gguf Python package its install does not always pull in, and without it the package imports silently, registers no classes, and every .gguf file becomes invisible to every loader. Naming the package means the panel can say which install is missing instead of reporting an unexplained absent node.

Changed

  • Flux.2 is its own model family now. Checkpoint detection used to match the substring "flux", so a Flux.2 filename read as Flux.1 and the panel called a preset compatible when its graph could not run the file at all. The two are not interchangeable — Flux.1 runs through a plain KSampler, Flux.2 needs the advanced sampler chain and a 128-channel latent at a 16× downscale where Flux.1 uses 16 channels at 8×, which is also why the Flux.1 VAE cannot decode these latents.
  • The two unfinished Flux1-dev presets are removed rather than completed. They had advertised themselves in the panel as awaiting a workflow JSON since v0.2.2. Full-precision Flux1-dev is a 23.8 GB diffusion weight before its T5, CLIP and VAE, which does not fit the 12 GB cards this project targets, and txt2img-flux1-dev-fp8 already ships stable and covers the same need. There was also no partial work to preserve: their model stack held one entry, the diffusion weight, with no CLIP, T5 or VAE, so finishing them meant building the stack from scratch. Every preset the panel lists is now one you can actually run — a first.

Known limitations

  • Assisted install is withheld, and the Setup screen still only reports and copies. It was built on the belief that ComfyUI-Manager's install_model endpoint would fetch a given URL on request. It will not. Before doing anything it checks the request against its own curated catalogue, matching save_path, base and filename exactly, and rejects everything else — so every request OpenLayer could build failed with HTTP 400 and nothing installed at all.

    Mapping the fields across would not have rescued it, which is why the feature is switched off rather than patched. Only 7 of the 16 model files this project pins are in that catalogue — Flux Fill, Krea-2 Turbo, Z_image_Turbo, Florence-2 and the whole Flux.2 stack are absent. And for several of the 7, the catalogue's download URL is not the one the registry pins: ComfyUI-Manager fetches ae.safetensors from the Black Forest Labs repository, where OpenLayer deliberately uses a public mirror because that repository answers 401 without a token. Delegating that download would save an authentication page under the model's filename — precisely the failure the licence-gate refusal exists to prevent, reintroduced by the mechanism that was supposed to be the safe path.

    What survives is the part that was right: the install plan, the refusals and the reason each one carries. A working version needs a download path that honours the registry's own verified URLs, and that is the next thing to build rather than a retry of this one.

  • The Flux.2 GGUF preset is slow on a 12 GB card, by a wide margin. An 18.7 GB quantised model plus a 16.8 GB text encoder means ComfyUI streams most of it from system RAM: minutes per image, not seconds. It also needs mistral_3_small_flux2_fp8.safetensors, which is licence-gated: accept the licence in a browser and download it by hand.

  • Live Painting is experimental. The live tier needs an SD 1.5 LCM LoRA in models/loras/, and Start Live Session reports an error naming it if none is found. The Refine tier additionally needs the three Krea-2 Turbo files; without them the live tier still works and Refine reports what is missing. Auto-import fires when you stop the session, by design.

  • Setup and Workflow Health overlap on purpose for now. Setup answers "what do I need and where does it go"; Health answers "can I run this preset right now".

  • "What will run well" reads the VRAM ComfyUI reports for its primary device. With ComfyUI stopped, every preset falls back to "Not known" and only the sizes are shown.

  • The panel still cannot open a browser — uxp.shell.openExternal has never been called in this project — which is why rows offer Copy Link rather than a button that opens the page.

  • Installation still requires the UXP Developer Tool. Whether a .ccx double-click install works on a machine that has never had developer mode enabled is documented as an open question in docs/DISTRIBUTION_SPIKE.md and needs a clean second machine to answer.

  • The Layer Tools card on Home does not dim when ComfyUI is unreachable, unlike the generation tools.

  • Layer, canvas, selection, and mask capture is limited to 16 megapixels (4096 x 4096) until a downscale option is added.

  • The Preview panel offers each tool's primary import only.

  • The setup pack contains no model weights. They are roughly 120 GB now and four are licence-restricted, so it ships the list and the 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.

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