PhotoCraft: The Free, Open-Source Photoshop Clone Built by AI - Should You Switch?
- photocraft
- adobe
- photoshop
- open source
- ai
In May, I wrote about replacing all my Adobe subscriptions with free software. I thought that story was done. Then October happened.
A developer named Brandon Thomas sat down with Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and rebuilt Photoshop from scratch. In Rust. In weeks. He didn't stop there. He rebuilt Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects, and InDesign too. Then he put all of it on GitHub, for free, under an open-source license.
PhotoCraft, the Photoshop clone, went public in the first week of October. By October 10 it had about 39,000 GitHub stars. As I write this, it's past 75,000, with more than 13,000 forks.
What actually dropped
Seven apps at launch, all free and open source under MIT or Apache 2.0, all written from scratch in Rust, all native apps for macOS, Windows, and Linux. No Electron, no web wrapper. PhotoCraft (Photoshop, early alpha), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere Pro), LightCraft (Lightroom), PdfCraft (Acrobat, early alpha), EffectCraft (After Effects), DesignCraft (InDesign). Six of them even run in a browser tab.
And Thomas didn't stop. The lineup is now at 13 apps: WordCraft (word processor, reads and writes .docx), GridCraft (spreadsheets, 513 of Excel's 523 worksheet functions already implemented), DeckCraft (slides), FigCraft (interface design), CADCraft (drafting, DXF and DWG), and SoundCraft (audio). He says AutoCAD and SolidWorks are next.
The real story isn't the apps, though. It's how they were made. Most of the code was written by an AI. ArtCraft's own contributor records credit Claude Opus 5.5 as co-author on about 77% of commits across the seven apps: 3,876 of 5,031 commits, adding more than 244,000 lines in PhotoCraft alone. The public history starts September 30. One developer, fifteen years of experience, one AI model, two weeks. Adobe built these programs over decades.
Does it actually work?
Partly. And to the team's credit, they're upfront about it. PhotoCraft's own page says it "is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work."
What works: real layered PSD and PSB files. Open, edit, save, and 307 of 309 files in a public test set come back unchanged. 68 tools. A real brush engine. 16 adjustment layers, 70+ live-preview filters, layer styles, smart objects. Serious color: RGB, CMYK, Lab and grayscale at 8, 16 and 32 bits, with ICC color management and soft proofing. It even opens Krita, Paint.NET, and Affinity files (read-only).
What's missing: generative AI features, about twenty tools, typography, pro workflows, and plug-in support. The team's own estimate puts it at roughly 45% ready for real professional work. Early testers have been less kind. One designer on Hacker News reported laggy controls, broken text editing, and shortcuts that did nothing. Thomas replied that reaching 99% parity "will take a while, but I'm sure it'll be measured in months and not years."
So no, don't cancel Creative Cloud today. But this is way past a demo. It's a real app, in early alpha, improving several times a week.
How to get it
The simplest route is the ArtCraft Launcher, which installs all the apps and keeps them updated. Or grab the standalone installers from each app's GitHub releases page. The browser versions need no install at all. You can try PhotoCraft right now in a tab.
One warning, and it matters: only download from getartcraft.com or the official GitHub repos (github.com/storytold/photocraft for PhotoCraft). There are already look-alike repos floating around offering a "local zip" or a password-protected archive. Those are not the official project.
My take
The apps are the news, but the method is the story. Thomas said it himself on Hacker News: "Everything can be open source multiplatform Rust now." He calls this the SaaSpocalypse, the idea that AI coding tools just collapsed the cost of rebuilding expensive software. I think he's half right. An AI didn't do this alone. It took a developer with fifteen years of experience to direct it, and the result is still alpha with real bugs.
But the direction is hard to argue with. GIMP spent decades getting to where it is. PhotoCraft covers about 76% of Photoshop's key features, by the team's own count, after a month. If the pace holds, and if the community that just gave it 75,000 stars sticks around to fix the bugs, the question won't be whether a free Photoshop clone can exist. It'll be why anyone still pays $23 a month for the original.
Try it. Break it. Report the bugs. That's how free software gets good.
Lounes Hareb
Sources:
https://github.com/storytold/photocraft
Full software listing: https://www.freewares.org/software/photocraft
