Free Photoshop alternative: PhotoCraft tested

PhotoCraft is an open-source Photoshop alternative written from scratch in Rust by the ArtCraft team, built around layers, masks, adjustment layers and real PSD files, and it runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and in the browser. The repository was created on September 30, 2026. Four days ago it had 16,823 GitHub stars; as of October 12 it has passed 50,000, and the latest release, v0.7.0, shipped on October 11. Stars are moving faster than versions, so the useful question is how much real work it can carry today — the resemblance to Photoshop is not in doubt. This article answers that with the project’s own roadmap, live GitHub data and community feedback.

Key points

The project rates itself about 45% ready for real work. PhotoCraft’s roadmap (read on 2026-10-12) labels the current stage alpha and puts “ready for real work” at roughly 45%; beta needs about 75% and is an estimated 1,100–1,800 “Opus 5.5 agent-hours” away. Four days ago the same figure was being retold as 25–35%.
PSD round trips are near-perfect on its own test set — and picky on Photoshop-authored files. The project reports 308 of 309 psd-tools files render identically after a re-save, and 169 of 170 in a mixed set; but only 133 of 256 Photoshop-authored oracle files render the way Photoshop renders them, and some exported PSDs do not open in Photoshop at all.
If you ship work on deadlines, the answer today is still no. Krita and GIMP carry years of real-user testing; PhotoCraft’s distinctive value is PSD compatibility, a familiar layout and complete MCP automation — good for trials, batch jobs and agent-driven editing, not yet for delivery.

From 16,000 to 50,000 stars in four days

The viral moment was a WeChat post from the account AGI Hunt on October 7, 2026: someone had rebuilt seven Adobe apps in Rust with AI and open-sourced all of them. PetaPixel reported the same day that the man behind them is ArtCraft founder Brandon Thomas, and that the model doing the heavy lifting was Anthropic’s Opus 5.5. OrcaRouter, after reading the repositories, concluded this was not “one prompt, one Photoshop”: several agents worked fairly independent subsystems — PSD parsing, the GPU compositor, text layout, filters — while a human handled integration, tests and releases.

Money is the subtext of the whole story. Adobe’s US list price for a single app is $22.99 a month (Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects and InDesign are priced the same, read from Adobe’s plans page via OrcaRouter on 2026-10-07), and buying all seven à la carte comes to about $146.93 a month. PhotoCraft is a free download under an MIT-or-Apache-2.0 dual license, with no usage fee and no telemetry. For someone paying $23 a month for half of Photoshop’s feature set, that gap explains roughly 34,000 stars in four days.

Heat is not the same as readiness, though, and the roadmap itself contains the sentence that explains every argument about PhotoCraft: every menu item is wired to a command, but that measures wiring, not behavior. That distinction — a checklist of 628 wired items against a weighted 45% readiness estimate — is the honest frame for everything below.

All 628 menus wired, and what that hides

The README labels PhotoCraft “early alpha.” The roadmap keeps a more detailed ledger, and the version read on 2026-10-12 scores the project three ways:

Dimension	Self-rating	Basis
Feature breadth	about 76%	menus 628/628, tools 56/68, panels 30/35, formats 13+4 of 31
Ready for real work	about 45%	weighted estimate, low end of the alpha band (40–75%)
Mainstream practitioner	about 43%	discounted across a typical pro’s weekly areas
Essentials user	about 61%	core features only

The trend line matters as much as the number. On October 8, when we published the seven-app comparison, the roadmap’s figure was “professional daily-switch about 25–35%”; four days later it reads 45%, with the version marching from v0.3.0 to v0.7.0 — a release a day. At that pace the beta gate (75% ready, no blocking PSD gap) is still an estimated 1,100–1,800 agent-hours out, about 80% of the work parallelizable. That estimate is itself a live sample of how fast AI-written software can move — and of how the remaining work concentrates in depth rather than breadth.

The same document is blunt about the other side of the ledger. The 0.5/0.6 series carried 579 open issues, 22 of 25 performance budgets missed, a GPU compositor crash at 150 layers, brush and cursor lag, and one macOS report of a 60-second freeze when picking the Type tool. The roadmap’s own phrasing is “breadth is high, but…” — the surface exists; robustness, depth and behavior on real machines are still being bought back hour by hour.

PSD: the closest thing, with a catch

For Photoshop users the selling point is PSD. PhotoCraft opens, edits and saves layered Photoshop documents, and its self-test numbers are strong: 308 of 309 files in the psd-tools test set render the same after a re-save (the figure was 307 of 309 four days ago), and 169 of 170 in a mixed ag-psd/psd-tools set. The README is equally precise about the limits: a re-saved file is not byte-identical to its source — PhotoCraft rewrites image resources, layer records and the composite — and only the standalone photocraft-psd crate reproduces every parseable corpus file byte for byte.

The third set of numbers is the one adoption decisions should rest on. Against the project’s Photoshop-authored oracle corpus — files written by Photoshop itself — only 133 of 256 render the way Photoshop renders them. The roadmap carries “exchange PSDs with Photoshop users” as its own line: acceptable for alpha, targeted at 200+ before beta at an estimated 150–250 hours, because some PhotoCraft exports do not open in Photoshop (issues #1281 and #2469). So “it opens my PSD” and “I can hand the file back to a Photoshop user” are two different claims, and only the first is true today.

The mature open-source tools sit differently on this axis. GIMP 3.2 improved PSD handling, but 2026 third-party reviews still find smart objects and some adjustment layers converting uncleanly; Krita’s strength is non-destructive editing — its filter layers behave much like Photoshop’s adjustment layers — but PSD interchange was never its design goal. PhotoCraft takes a third route: the menus, shortcuts and panels sit where Photoshop users expect them (⌘J duplicates a layer, ⇧⌘D deselects), and the files it reads and writes are real PSDs. For anyone who opens client PSDs daily, “it opens and looks about right” has a cost value of its own.

PhotoCraft vs Krita vs GIMP

Three free seats, three different jobs. The facts below come from each project’s public information as of 2026-10-12:

Dimension	PhotoCraft v0.7.0	Krita (6.0 line)	GIMP (3.2)
License	MIT / Apache-2.0	GPL-3.0	GPL-3.0
GitHub stars	50,735	10,532	6,507 (mirror repo)
Positioning	Photoshop reimplementation	digital painting studio	general-purpose image editor
PSD	read/write, 308/309 round trip	limited	improved in 3.2, smart objects still lossy
Adjustment layers	16 kinds, incl. Curves and Hue/Saturation	filter layers (non-destructive)	partial
CMYK	native documents, 8/16/32-bit	yes	yes
Color management	pure-Rust ICC, soft proofing, gamut warning	yes	yes
Brush engine	shape dynamics, scattering, texture, dual brush	community-acknowledged strength	yes
Plugin ecosystem	none (listed as a top gap)	rich	rich
Automation	CLI, JSON control channel, MCP server	Python scripting	Script-Fu (Python)
Maturity self-rating	alpha, ~45% ready for real work	years of stable releases	3.x stable line

Krita has a fifth of PhotoCraft’s stars and two decades less hype, but it is a KDE project that shipped 5.3.0 and 6.0.0 side by side on March 24, 2026 — one source tree, two builds, depending on your Qt and KDE Frameworks versions. GIMP 3.2 is the veteran with the largest tutorial corpus. On paper PhotoCraft is the closest to Photoshop: 67 tools, 27 blend modes plus six Paint.NET variants, all ten layer effects, editable type layers that survive the PSD round trip. That familiarity is something neither Krita nor GIMP offers, and it is the whole product.

What PhotoCraft does not have is an ecosystem. Plugin compatibility is named in its own list of biggest gaps, so every Photoshop filter, action and brush pack a user has accumulated is dead weight on arrival. Two more engineering details deserve their due: the GPU compositor runs on wgpu (Metal, Vulkan, DX12, WebGPU) with a CPU compositor as a reference oracle, the two tested against each other to within 1/255; and 256² copy-on-write tiles keep undo cheap, with a radius-180 Gaussian blur on a 3.6 MP image finishing in under a second. Those are self-reported numbers, and 22 of 25 performance budgets still missed — “fast” is a per-scenario claim, not a blanket one.

What you actually get on day one

Past the star count, the feature inventory is the part a Photoshop user can check item by item. The README lists 67 tools — the full marquee and lasso family, quick and object selection, magic wand, crop and perspective crop, the healing and clone family, pen tools with all three variants, 33 shape and type tools — and every filter dialog previews live on canvas through the active selection. The brush engine covers shape dynamics, scattering, texture, dual brush, color dynamics, transfer and brush pose, driven by pen pressure, tilt, rotation and direction, with deterministic replayable strokes.

The non-destructive story is the most Photoshop-like part. Sixteen adjustment layers — Curves with per-channel editing, Levels with a live histogram, Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, Channel Mixer, Gradient Map, Photo Filter, Selective Color, Color Lookup — stack, mask, reorder and toggle without touching original pixels. All ten layer effects (Drop Shadow through Pattern Overlay) work on any layer including live type, patterns import and export as .pat, and smart objects keep their filters editable. Layer work covers groups, clipping masks, pixel and vector masks, fill layers, 27 blend modes plus six Paint.NET variants, opacity and fill, locks and layer filters.

On file formats, PhotoCraft reads and writes PSD and PSB, layered TIFF, OpenRaster (for Krita, MyPaint and GIMP interop), Paint.NET PDN3 (read), SVG as shape layers, and a long tail of flat formats from OpenEXR and Radiance HDR to FITS astronomy images, plus its native .pcraft. iPhone HEIC photos are read-only, AVIF is write-only behind a build feature, and Affinity documents open read-only with unsupported parts listed in a warning. Color management is pure Rust: embedded ICC profiles, assign and convert with four rendering intents, black point compensation, soft proofing and gamut warning on the GPU — at 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel, with bit depth and color model as runtime data so every tool works at every depth.

Getting it running

The supported install paths are unusually broad for a project this young. The easiest route is the PhotoCraft page on getartcraft.com; the GitHub release page carries every build with a SHA256SUMS.txt checksum list. macOS gets a universal DMG, signed and notarized, plus a signed CLI zip. Windows has MSI installers and portable zips for x64, arm64 and x86, all code-signed. Linux has AppImage (with .zsync self-update), Flatpak, .deb, .rpm and tarballs on x86_64, aarch64 and riscv64; the Flatpak pulls the freedesktop runtime from Flathub on first install, which is a one-time prompt rather than a bundled dependency. FreeBSD 14 gets a tarball laid out like /usr/local, and the whole engine and UI compile to WebAssembly for a self-hosted browser build that runs from any static server.

Two rough edges are documented rather than hidden. On a Wayland session, files dropped on the window do not open — the windowing library under the UI, winit 0.30, has no Wayland drag and drop yet — so you use File › Open, paste with Ctrl+V, or relaunch under XWayland. And source builds without the optional craft-fonts input fall back to your system CJK fonts for the UI and Type tool; desktop release builds always include it.

A command line and an MCP server

The structural difference between PhotoCraft and every other open-source image tool is that it was born agent-ready. Every menu item, tool and dialog runs a command from one registry of 500+ commands, and the UI, the CLI, the JSON control channel and the MCP server all call the same commands:

# Headless: open, edit, save
photocraft-cli run wave.psd \
  --cmd filter.sharpen.smartSharpen     --params '{"amount":80}' \
  --cmd layer.newAdjustmentLayer.curves --params '{"points":[[0,0],[64,48],[192,212],[255,255]]}' \
  --out wave-final.png

# Apply one action list to a folder of images
photocraft-cli batch --actions grade.json --in ./raw --out ./graded

# Let an agent drive it over MCP (headless, or bridged to the running app)
photocraft-cli mcp

The desktop app also exposes an authenticated, loopback-only control channel (photocraft --control) for inspecting UI state, driving tools with pointer events and taking offscreen screenshots — every demo image in the README was rendered that way. For developers this adds up to something concrete: batch-apply one grade to a thousand files, let a coding agent retouch images, wire “open PSD → curves → export” into CI, all without simulating clicks. Krita and GIMP have scripting answers of their own, but “every action is a command, every command is MCP-callable” was designed in from the start here, not bolted on.

What the community found

The attention brought real users, and real users brought receipts. The three main Hacker News threads (49958850, 49981449, 49993722) split sharply. Supporters like the permissive license and the zero telemetry — the author, posting as echelon, confirms all of it is MIT/Apache with no telemetry — and some argue the front-end software was never Adobe’s moat; the cloud services and collaboration are. Skeptics reported specific failures: an early Flatpak build missing files the README referenced (v0.3.0 and later ship a Flatpak), an image that would not paste from the clipboard, a clone stamp with no live preview. Others worry about maintenance in a year; the counter-argument is that a permissive license lets anyone fork it.

YouTube has already produced the hands-on verdicts: kilObit’s “I Tried PhotoCraft: The Free Open-Source Photoshop Alternative” has 67,704 views as of 2026-10-12, which says the “does it actually work” question is a mass-market one, not a niche one. One dispute remains unresolved and is worth knowing before you adopt anything: is this a clean-room implementation? The project says it is — built from public specifications and observed behavior, with no Adobe code, shaders or assets. Hacker News commenters noted there is no evidence of decompilation, while others question whether a heavily AI-generated codebase earns the clean-room label at all. There is no verdict today.

The author’s own community remark is worth recording too: he said he is unhappy with GIMP, Krita and Inkscape, which is why he wrote his own. The replies defending those projects as years-long efforts by serious maintainers were many. For a reader the point is narrower: you are spending your afternoon on a project that may be unmaintained in a year, and the alternative across the table has been maintained for two decades.

One caveat belongs beside all of this: none of the above is systematic testing. The reports are individual comments in forum threads and videos, not benchmarks with a sample size, and the project’s own numbers are self-reported. PhotoCraft does run more than 1,700 automated tests — PSD round trips, synthetic generators, compositor oracles, multi-depth checks — but automated tests measure regressions, not whether a professional can ship with it. The only reliable test is your own file corpus, on your machine, which is why the download link below matters more than any review, including this one.

Who should try it, who should wait

Sorted by what you actually do, the verdicts are less complicated than the star count suggests:

Designers and retouchers shipping complex PSDs every day: stay on Photoshop, or at least keep the subscription. A 45% self-rating, a 133/256 render match on Photoshop-authored files and exports that may not reopen are not odds you bet a delivery on. If budget is the pressure, the cheaper move is a used license or an older Creative Cloud plan, not an alpha.
Occasional PSD openers and light editors: download it and try. Zero learning curve, and half an hour comparing its render of your own files against Photoshop’s settles it. Install from getartcraft.com/apps/photocraft or the GitHub release; the macOS build is signed and notarized.
Developers and automation work: this is its strongest use today. Batch processing, MCP-driven editing, image work in CI — a free license and a complete command surface make the experiment nearly free. Its sibling LightCraft takes the same approach to raw development.
Students and learners: the price is right and the layout teaches Photoshop conventions transferable to the real thing. Just keep the originals in a format you can reopen in Photoshop later, because the exchange path is exactly what is still being built.
Anyone watching how far AI-written software can go: read the roadmap rather than the tweets. The distance between “628 menu items wired” and “45% ready” is the entire story.

PhotoCraft belongs to a bigger picture: our seven-app comparison weighs all of ArtCraft’s Adobe alternatives, and the free office-suite field has its own ten-suite comparison. The project’s GitHub page keeps moving — versions have been outpacing the star curve, four days a shape.

FAQ

Is PhotoCraft free for commercial use?

Yes and yes. The repository is dual-licensed MIT or Apache-2.0 at your option, with no fee and no telemetry. ArtCraft’s website sells a separate AI creative studio; that is a different product from these open-source apps.

Will it open my PSD files?

Most likely, and most likely render them correctly (308/309 in its own test set). Two caveats: files with smart objects and complex descriptors may lose content — multi-layer smart object conversion and mask targeting are listed as partial, with workarounds — and PSDs it exports do not always open in Photoshop. Back up anything important first, and treat the round trip as something to verify on your own files, not a guarantee.

Does it support CMYK?

Yes. RGB, grayscale, CMYK and Lab documents open natively at 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel, with bit depth and color model as runtime data. Color management is pure Rust with embedded profiles, four rendering intents, soft proofing and gamut warning — one place where it is ahead of Inkscape, which has no CMYK mode at all. Print work still needs a proofing step: the roadmap schedules print and CMYK/Lab UI polish for later milestones, so treat on-screen CMYK as a reading capability first.