What is Qwen AI? Introducing the New Alibaba Image Model—Qwen Image Layered

Qwen AI is an open-source large model ecosystem developed by Alibaba Cloud. It’s not just a single tool but a family of models deeply optimized for different use cases. This model has been dubbed the “Photoshop of AI,” as it addresses the long-standing issue of the lack of physical isolation editing capabilities in generative AI. When it extracts an object from the background, it uses its understanding of the physical world to automatically repair and fill in the textures of the hidden areas, allowing designers to maintain the integrity of the background with a “zero-drift” edit.

While AI art tools have generated stunning visual effects over the past few years, they have always felt like a “beautiful black box” to professional designers. The generated images are essentially flat files with all pixels glued together. When trying to move an object within the image, the background often appears torn or deformed. Alibaba's newly open-sourced Qwen-Image-Layered model breaks through this technical barrier, evolving from “visual surface imitation” to a key shift towards “understanding physical space.”

From “Pixel Prediction” to “Spatial Reconstruction”

The traditional logic behind AI image generation is pixel prediction, where it guesses the color of the next pixel, but it doesn't understand the occlusion relationships between objects. This is why when you delete an object in an image, AI often fails to perfectly reconstruct the hidden background. Qwen-Image-Layered switches to a spatial reconstruction dimension:

• Physical-level depth understanding: Through its self-developed RGBA-VAE technology, the model assigns transparency to each element during generation, making the generated objects not just flat drawings but more like an architect who first understands the objects in space and who is blocking whom.

• Automatic “filling in” of hidden areas: The model uses VLD-MMDiT architecture and 3D position encoding to automatically deduce and repair background textures hidden by foreground objects. When you move the main object in the image, the previously obscured floor or wall will be filled in by the AI, ensuring true spatial integrity.

Powerful Layering and Editing Capabilities

The core strength of this model lies in transforming AI-generated images into a structured layer format, similar to Photoshop, enabling zero-drift precise editing.

• Physically isolated editing: Since each layer is physically independent, you can freely recolor, resize, rotate, or delete specific objects without affecting the background or other layers' consistency. This completely resolves the issue of AI editing where modifying one part could disrupt the whole image.

• Flexible layer control: Depending on the complexity of the scene, the model can automatically or on-demand break the image down into 3 to 10 layers. Whether it's simple background removal for products or complex scene decompositions, it handles it with ease.

From a Generator to a “Professional Productivity Tool”

The introduction of Qwen-Image-Layered marks the shift of AI from being a “content generator” to a “material supplier,” transforming workflows in multiple industries:

• E-commerce photography and design: Photographers only need to take one base image, and AI can automatically separate the product from the background. Designers can instantly generate dozens of scene variants or change colors for specific product parts, saving time on repetitive shooting and manual image editing.

• Game development and animation production: It can directly generate sprite images with transparent channels, allowing 2D game developers to drag and drop the objects into game engines without needing extra image processing software.

• Comic editing and translation: The model can automatically separate dialogue bubbles, characters, and backgrounds, allowing translators to edit the text layers without disrupting the original artwork. It even allows easy creation of motion comics through layer separation.

• Democratization of professional photo editing: It lowers the barrier for advanced photo editing. For regular users, complex object relocation and background restoration tasks, which previously required advanced Photoshop skills, can now be completed in minutes with AI processing.

In the evolution of image processing, Alibaba’s Qwen-Image-Layered is transforming AI from a simple “artist” to a “deconstructor” with spatial logic. Compared to other common segmentation tools or drawing software, its uniqueness lies not only in technical specifications but also in redefining the logic of generating digital materials.

Digital Surgery vs. Contour Outlining: The Fundamental Difference from Traditional Segmentation Tools (e.g., SAM)

Traditional segmentation models like Meta’s SAM focus mainly on “identification and framing,” telling the computer where the cat is and where the tree is.

• From Mask to RGBA Layer: SAM outputs a binary mask, like a black-and-white cutout, whereas Qwen generates full RGBA materials with an alpha channel.

• Spatial Repair Capability (Inpainting): This is the biggest difference between the two. When SAM removes an object, the background leaves a hole. Qwen, however, fills in the background textures intelligently during the layer decomposition, ensuring that the background remains intact after object removal.

Instant Automation vs. Artisan Precision: Competitiveness with Professional Software (e.g., Photoshop)

Photoshop is the standard in design, but its power comes from a lot of manual labor.

• Efficiency difference: In Photoshop, even skilled designers need 30 to 60 minutes to manually complete high-quality masking, layering, and background restoration. Qwen can automatically generate PSD-level layer stacks in 2 to 5 minutes.

• Solving Pixel Entanglement: Traditional AI photo editing often struggles with “a small change causing big problems,” where changing a shirt color might distort the skin. Qwen’s physical isolation ensures that edits only affect the targeted layer, achieving “zero-drift” editing, a crucial advantage in commercial photography and e-commerce design.

Unique Cutting-Edge Innovation: Recursive Decomposition

This is the “black tech” that has impressed the tech community—Qwen-Image-Layered breaks through traditional layer count limits.

• Russian Doll Logic: Most AIs can only distinguish between foreground and background, but Qwen can recursively break down layers within layers. For example, you can first deconstruct an image into “person” and “office,” then further decompose the “person” layer into “watch,” “suit,” and “shoes.”

• Endless Granularity: This recursive ability can theoretically extend infinitely, allowing creators to independently operate on any small detail in the image. This makes AI-generated images not just static “dead images” but a dynamic, adjustable material library.

Qwen AI has moved from “drawing an image” to “understanding a space,” and its performance in image generation has far exceeded basic pixel generation. Its core advantages lie in its deep rendering of physical structures, precise capture of complex instructions, and structured presentation in text aesthetics. Here are three points of deep performance analysis for Qwen AI in practical use:

Rendering Capability

Qwen’s rendering technology is highly praised for producing clear, semantically accurate text in generated images. For testing, we used the following prompt to generate:

Prompt: Generate a movie poster titled “Endless,” with the release date “December 26, 2025” at the bottom.

The test result showed that Qwen’s rendering capability could accurately generate the desired image, with not only Chinese text but also English and numbers well presented.

Prompt Understanding

To test Qwen’s understanding of various prompts, we used the following prompt to generate:

Prompt: Hand-drawn style, in a circular square where it is snowing, a group of children building a snowman. There are small wooden houses beside the square, with smoke coming out of their chimneys, and the houses are lit inside. The scene should be very warm.

The image generated closely matched the visual details described in the prompt, showcasing Qwen’s strengths.

Text Rendering

Text rendering was once a major challenge for AI image generation, but Qwen has made significant breakthroughs in this area. To test it, we used the following prompt:

Prompt: Create an event poster titled “Christmas Event,” with the event rules “Generate the image, post it to the event page, like and share, and the grand prize is a one-year Creator Plan.”

The resulting image demonstrated Qwen’s accurate text rendering capabilities, handling multiple lines of text and paragraph structure, even in a bilingual English and Chinese scenario.

Qwen AI is open-source and commercially friendly, which fundamentally differentiates its cost structure from traditional subscription-based AI tools:

Almost Zero Licensing Cost for Professional Tools

Qwen AI models (especially Qwen-Image and Qwen-Image-Layered) are mostly licensed under the Apache 2.0 open-source license, offering a completely free technical alternative. This means both individual developers and businesses can download, modify, and use them for commercial purposes without paying high licensing fees.

Different Usage and Fee Models

While the model itself is free, costs can vary depending on your usage:

• Free trial (Platform): Regular users can test it for free through open platforms like Hugging Face or ModelScope, often without registration or payment.

• Paid API & Enterprise Version: Large-scale integration into commercial systems, or using stable API services from Alibaba Cloud, may require payments based on the amount of usage (tokens or image counts).

• Alternative tools (Point-based system): Tools like MyEdit may charge a subscription fee starting from NTD 120 or use a daily free point system.

When Alibaba’s Qwen-Image-Layered stunned the design world with its “layer separation” technology, many creators encountered bottlenecks during actual use: incomplete Traditional Chinese support, high GPU requirements, and frequent switching between different AI tools. If you’re looking for a tool that understands Chinese formatting better than Qwen, is more intuitive than Photoshop, and handles everything from “text, images, and video” in one platform, GenApe is the ultimate solution.

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