Layers

Layers places transparent images — logos, signage, characters, textures, even full 360 overlays — directly onto a render's panorama. You position them on the sphere, choose how each one maps onto the globe, style them with blend modes and effects, and commit to bake the result into a new step on your derivation graph.

Open a render, then pick Layers from the viewer toolbar. It's available on renders only.

Adding images

Three ways in, all equivalent:

• The file picker in the Layers panel
• Drag a file onto the canvas
• Drop a file from your desktop onto the app window

Accepted formats: PNG, JPEG, and WebP. Transparency is preserved from PNG and WebP. Animated WebP uses the first frame. Other formats are skipped.

You can stack up to 64 layers. Past 16 you'll get a one-time nudge that things are getting heavy — it's a suggestion, not a limit. Individual images can be large (up to the app canvas limit); full-sphere work is limited by system RAM, not the GPU.

Placing and selecting

Drag a sticker on the sphere to move it. The selected layer shows a frame with a roll handle for rotation, and the scroll wheel adjusts its size — unless the layer is a full-sphere overlay, where size does not apply.

With several layers selected, dragging any one of them moves the whole group together as a single undo step. Locked layers stay put — locking freezes position only, so a locked layer can still be restyled, flipped, or given effects.

How a layer maps onto the sphere

Each layer has a projection — the rule that turns its flat image into something sitting on the globe. New layers use Auto: at ordinary sizes they look like a flat sticker with straight lines, and as you grow Size they gradually curve so a single layer can cover a full 360°.

Other options live in the layer inspector:

• Gnomonic — straight lines stay straight; stops just under a hemisphere.
• Stereographic — a fixed wide curve that keeps small shapes honest, up to a very wide view.
• Equidistant / Equal Area — advanced radial mappings (even spacing, or area-true).
• 360 Equirect — treats the image as a full panorama wrapped around the whole sphere. Yaw slides it around; Size does not apply (the remembered size is kept so switching back to Auto restores it). Near-2:1 panoramas may land here automatically on import.

Switching projection is reversible and one undo step — it reinterprets the same pixels; it does not discard them.

Aligning and arranging

Select two or more layers and the Align panel appears.

Align — yaw (horizontal), pitch (vertical), horizon, size, roll, and reset roll. Alignment is anchored to your primary selection, so a locked layer can still act as the anchor everything else snaps to.

Distribute — yaw, pitch, and ring360. Yaw distribution is seam-aware: it finds the largest empty arc and spreads across the occupied one, so a group straddling the 360° wrap point doesn't get torn apart. ring360 spaces layers evenly around the full circle with the anchor held fixed.

The layer stack

The stack panel lists every layer, front to back, with:

• Opacity and 19 blend modes (Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Soft Light, and the rest of the Photoshop set)
• Visibility toggle — Alt-click the eye to solo a layer and hide everything else. Solo is a preview convenience; it never changes what gets baked.
• Reorder, lock, and delete
• Duplicate, copy, and paste
• Flip horizontal / vertical
• Replace layer source — swap the image without losing position or styling

Right-click a row for the full menu. Actions apply to your whole selection, each as one undo step.

Layer effects

Right-click a layer and open its effects to add Stroke, Drop Shadow, Outer Glow, Color Overlay, and Gradient Overlay.

Effects are an additive stack, not five on/off switches — add several strokes at different widths, stack two glows, whatever the look needs. Up to 16 effects per layer. Each one can be muted without deleting it, reordered within its type, and duplicated.

Stroke position is Outside, Center, or Inside, and the inner edge takes its own blend mode — so a stroke can multiply into the artwork rather than sitting on top of it.

Effects copy independently of layers: Ctrl/Cmd+Alt+C copies a layer's whole effect stack, Ctrl/Cmd+Alt+V pastes it onto every selected layer. Pasting a full stack replaces the destination's effects; pasting a single effect appends it.

Per-layer image tools

These act on one layer (the primary / right-clicked row), not the whole selection. Each successful run is a single undo step.

Upsample (2× or 4×) runs the source through Real-ESRGAN for more resolution before placement. Long edge is capped at the app’s large-canvas limit (up to 16384px).

Cut out removes an image’s background automatically, turning a photo into a sticker. Requires an activated license and downloads the BiRefNet matting model on first use via Settings → Models.

Knockout makes a colour transparent — white and black by default, or any colour you pick — while keeping soft, anti-aliased edges intact. It is the fix for a PNG that arrives with a white box around it.

It removes that colour everywhere it appears, not just in the background. A white shirt, a cloud, or a bright highlight inside your subject will go partly transparent too. That is what colour-to-alpha does, and it is why Cut out (Auto Mask) — which guesses the subject instead — is the right tool when the background is not a flat colour. Undo restores the layer.

If faint flecks of the background survive — common when the image has ever been a JPEG, because compression leaves the "white" a few shades off — use Knockout Color, pick the background with the eyedropper, and raise Tolerance a little until they go.

The Silhouette and Wand switches change the method. They are not a quality boost on colour-to-alpha.

Silhouette keeps the sticker's own colours and punches only the backdrop — dark when you press Black, light when you press White — then rebuilds a short soft edge. It still keys every matching pixel, including holes inside the subject.

Wand is Silhouette plus a border flood: only backdrop that touches the picture edge goes. Enclosed holes stay (black under Black, light under White). Turn Wand on and Silhouette turns on with it.

The switches sit under White / Black / Color… on the Actions panel. Color… ignores them — it is still colour-to-alpha.

Contract shrinks the visible edge inward by a few whole pixels (the soft fringe moves with it). Run it after a Knockout when a faint halo remains. It eats into the subject by the amount you set; it does not invent a clean cutout. If you contract by more than the object is thick, the whole layer would vanish, so the app refuses and leaves the layer unchanged.

Run Knockout or Cut out, not both on the same edge. Silhouette and Wand replace the current alpha, including a Cut out edge — they do not over-brighten, they rebuild the matte from luma. Running either twice still eats the edge inward. Each successful run is one Undo step.

Distort bends a flat sticker by dragging its four corners, then bakes the warp into a new source image. It only works while the layer is still on the “straight-lines” path (Auto at ordinary sizes, or Gnomonic). Wide Auto, Stereographic, and full-sphere layers refuse it — switch projection first if you need it. Commit applies the warp; Cancel leaves the layer untouched. Commit also trims empty transparent border automatically when the warped result has margin to spare — same step, no second action.

Crop Transparent trims the empty transparent border off a layer so the stored image hugs the visible pixels, leaving a little clear padding (default 5% of the content size on each side — adjust the slider next to the button, 0–20%). The sticker stays put on the sphere; only the wasted margin goes away. It runs for you after every Distort commit (above), and you can run it anytime from the Actions panel or the layer’s right-click menu on a flat, unlocked sticker. It does not always change the image: a layer already cropped tight (including that padding) is left alone, and a layer with nothing visible is refused. When it does trim, one Undo restores the untrimmed image.

Invert flips the layer’s colours immediately — no editor, no second step. The sticker does not move. One Undo restores the previous image.

Auto Levels measures the layer’s opaque pixels and stretches each colour channel toward full range when that channel has room to move. It applies immediately, same as Invert. It does not always improve the image, and often does nothing: an already full-range layer is left alone; a fully transparent layer has nothing to measure; a flat solid colour has no tonal range to stretch. When it does rewrite the image, one Undo puts the original back.

Levels and Curves open the Adjust editor on the selected layer. Drag the controls and the sphere updates live — nothing is baked until you commit. Cancel discards the edit with no history entry. Commit writes a single new image (one quantization) and is one Undo step, whether you used Levels, Curves, or both in the same visit. While Adjust is open, other layer tools wait until you finish or cancel.

Wrap to 360 turns a tiling rectangle into a full-sphere panorama and switches the layer to 360 Equirect in one step. Choose a wrap style (polyhedral solid, latitude squeeze, belt repeats, or kaleidoscopic orbifold). Already-sphere layers refuse a second wrap. Large outputs can be refused when the machine does not have enough system RAM — that is intentional, not a silent failure.

Collapse

Collapse merges several eligible stickers into one layer. Compact groups stay a single flat sticker. Groups that span too wide on the sphere become a full-sphere layer instead, at the panorama’s resolution, after a confirmation that shows the cost. Very large full-sphere collapses (especially on 16K parents) need tens of gigabytes of system memory and will be refused on most machines — work at a smaller parent size, or collapse fewer layers at a time.

Stickers only show while the tool is open

This is deliberate and it surprises people. Layers paint on the sphere exactly as long as the Layers tool is armed. Switch to another tool or close Layers and the panorama goes back to plain — the stickers are not gone, they're just not painting.

Your work is safe. The draft is written to disk. Re-open Layers on the same render and everything comes back — positions, effects, undo history. Switching tools never prompts you and never discards anything. The unsaved-work dot on the toolbar button tells you a draft is waiting.

If you want to see your layers on the panorama outside the tool, that's what Commit is for.

Committing

Commit bakes the composite into a new node on your derivation graph as a permanent step. From there it behaves like any other render step — it's what downstream operations build on, and it's what you export.

To change a committed layer stack later, open that node in the graph and use the re-edit action. It forks the layer setup back onto the parent so you can adjust and re-commit, leaving the original step intact.

Keyboard shortcuts

Copy and paste work within one panorama. Pasting into a different render isn't supported yet.

See also

• Derivation Graph — how committed steps chain together
• Spot Editing — AI inpainting on a region of the sphere
• Keyboard Shortcuts