Video generation company Runway has announced the launch of Layers: a one-click feature that allows users to break any image into editable layers, enabling background removal, text changes, and individual element rework without leaving Runway. The official demonstration emphasizes completing the splitting and recomposition within the same workspace.

The company's update log indicates that in August, Seedream 5.0 Pro Layers were made available to paid users, allowing them to toggle and independently transform each layer for fine-grained retouching and material extraction. Recently, Runway has also been integrated into DaVinci and launched the MCP on the Cursor marketplace, bringing generative capabilities into existing editing and coding workflows. The brand suite can also be called by agents.

At the same time, companies like Luma use their own models to break finished images into text, fonts, objects, and backgrounds, exporting transparent backgrounds for localized revisions; Envato Layers similarly decomposes flat images into movable layers, clarifying that this does not restore the original design files but creates a new layer structure using models. Open-source routes like Tongyi output physically isolated RGBA layers, attempting to reduce the global impact of modifying a single area.

Designer feedback indicates that the layer splitting results can be imported into After Effects and Photoshop. An industry pain point is that modifying a title or product in a generated image requires redoing the entire image, which also alters the already approved parts.

In market dynamics, buyers are post-production teams that need to modify finished advertisements and opening titles, while sellers are model companies that keep "generate then edit" within the same subscription. The event is driven by feature releases, shifting workflows from exporting to Photoshop to in-platform layer splitting; beneficiaries are generative suites that can lock in retouching steps, while those under pressure are tools that only sell one-time image outputs and still require external desktop software for retouching.

Source: Public Information