PhotoCraft: the open-source Photoshop clone, checked

What PhotoCraft is

PhotoCraft is one of twelve "Crafting Apps" released by the ArtCraft team between late September and early October 2026, each a clean-room rebuild of a commercial desktop app. PhotoCraft is the Photoshop one and by far the most watched: its GitHub repository had more than 48,000 stars on 2026-10-12, twelve days after it was created.

• Familiar layout: the menus, panels, tools and shortcuts follow Photoshop, so existing muscle memory carries over.
• Native, not a web wrapper: written in Rust with a GPU canvas on Metal, Vulkan, DirectX 12 and WebGPU. No Electron.
• Non-destructive editing: 16 adjustment layers, 70+ live-preview filters, smart objects with smart filters and layer styles.
• Serious color: 8, 16 and 32-bit documents in RGB, CMYK, Lab and Grayscale, with ICC color management and soft proofing.
• On-device selection: subject and object selection run on your machine, not a cloud server.

"Clean-room" means the team says it was written from public specifications and observed behaviour only, with no Adobe code, shaders or assets.

Is PhotoCraft safe? How to download it

Only download from the two official places: the PhotoCraft page on getartcraft.com or the GitHub releases page. Popular new open-source apps attract fake "download" repositories and mirror sites that bundle malware, so skip anything else.

There are two ways to install it:

• ArtCraft Launcher (recommended by the developers): installs PhotoCraft and the other Crafting Apps, picks the right build for your computer and handles updates. Launcher version 0.2.1 at the time of checking.
• Standalone installer: PhotoCraft on its own, version 0.7.0 at the time of checking.

The GitHub README also lists FreeBSD builds.

Does PhotoCraft open PSD files?

Yes, and this is its strongest feature. PSD support is a standalone module written from Adobe's public file specification and tested against real files:

• The official page says 134 of 135 real-world test files round-trip byte for byte.
• The README says re-saving keeps the render of 307 of 309 files in the psd-tools test set, and 116 of 116 shape layers in their corpus match Photoshop's pixels.
• Large PSB documents and layered TIFF files also open and save.

It also reads Paint.NET, OpenRaster (Krita, MyPaint, GIMP), SVG, HEIC from iPhones and, read-only, Affinity documents. AVIF is export-only and JPEG XL is not supported.

PhotoCraft vs Photoshop: what is still missing

The developers list the biggest gaps themselves:

• AI and generative features. Nothing like Generative Fill yet.
• 15 missing tools.
• Typography and pro workflows are shallower than Photoshop's.
• Plug-ins. Photoshop plug-ins do not work.

They also warn that every Photoshop menu item being wired to a command "measures wiring, not behaviour". In other words, a menu item existing does not mean it behaves exactly like Photoshop's.

Why AI builders care: it can be driven by an agent

Every menu item, tool and dialog in PhotoCraft runs a command from a single registry of 500+ commands. The app, a headless command-line tool, a JSON control channel and an MCP server all call the same commands. That means an AI agent such as Claude can open a file, apply a list of edits to a folder of images and save the results without anyone clicking.

That matters if you are building an app or workflow that needs image editing in the loop: you get a scriptable, Photoshop-style engine with no licence fee. The same design runs across the other Crafting Apps.

Who should try it now

• Try it: Linux users, people who only need to open and tweak PSD files, students, and developers who want a scriptable image editor.
• Wait: anyone billing clients for retouching or design work, and anyone who depends on Generative Fill or plug-ins.

If you do try it, the developers ask for bug reports with your OS, document size, layer count and a screenshot.