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Splitting an Image into Layers

The third edit tab: cut a picture into its parts, then hide or delete one without asking the model to invent what was behind it.

What it is for

The other two tabs can only paint over something. Ask Inpaint to take a person out of a photo and you are really asking the model to invent whatever was standing behind them, which is why the patch so often comes back smudged or wrong.

Layers answers the question properly. The picture is split into its parts — the person, the hills behind them, the sky, a block of text — and each part is a cut-out of its own. Hiding the person then reveals the hills, because the hills were always their own layer. Nothing is imagined.

Doing it

Open any picture, go to the Layers tab and press the split button. The parts come back as a list, each with its own name, a colour swatch and an eye. From there:

• The eye hides or shows a part.
• The ✕ removes one for good.
• Download parts saves every part that is still switched on, each as its own transparent PNG. There is no per-part download button, so hide the ones you do not want before you press it.
• Save as new image flattens the visible parts into one picture and downloads that PNG. Despite the name it does not put anything back in your gallery — the flattening happens in your browser, so the file lands in your downloads folder like any other.

You pay once

The split costs credits. Everything after it — hiding, showing, deleting, downloading a part, saving the result — happens on parts already sitting in your browser and never calls the AI again, so it never spends again. Play with the layers as long as you like.

The price is written on the split button before you press it, and it comes from the live price list rather than being typed into this page. If the button shows no price it is switched off rather than free.

A text layer is a picture of text

When the split finds words it marks that row TEXT — and that badge is a warning, not a feature. The layer is still an image of the letters, so you can hide it or delete it, but you cannot retype it — and nothing in the tab moves a layer either. Fixing a spelling means regenerating that part of the picture the ordinary way.

When a picture will not split

Three different things can stop a split, and only one of them is about your picture.

• The whole tab says it is not switched on. "Splitting pictures into layers is not switched on yet — it arrives with the next backend update. Edit with Prompt and Inpaint work as normal." The part that does the cutting is not live yet. Nothing is wrong with your account and there is nothing to buy.
• The button is there but cannot be pressed, under a line reading "No price is set for splitting yet, so it cannot be bought." A split with no price is switched off, not free.
• The split runs but finds nothing to cut apart. When no parts come back, the tab says it in its own words: "The picture came back without any parts. Nothing was charged." Try a picture with clearer, separate things in it — a flat pattern has nothing to cut apart. A split that finds only one part is not a failure: it is shown as an ordinary result with a single layer in the list.
• The split stops for some other reason. Then the tab shows whatever the server said, word for word, which can be a technical line such as "Edge Function returned a non-2xx status code".

Where to next

• Next in Image Creator: Kit
• Changing it, not splitting: Edit & Inpaint — The other two edit tabs, and why they cannot remove things.
• Before you split again: How Credits Work — What one split costs and why nothing after it does.

6 of 12 in Image Creator · Last checked 17 September 2026 · Previous: Edit & Inpaint