What is PhotoCraft?
PhotoCraft is a free, open-source image editor built as a clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust, developed in the open by the ArtCraft team. It ships layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, type, vectors and brushes in a native desktop app — with full read/write support for real layered PSD files. No subscription, no account, no cloud: the code is MIT/Apache-2.0 licensed and works fully offline. Frequently dubbed the community's favorite AI Photoshop clone and craft photoshop project, PhotoCraft delivers an authentic Photoshop feel with 100% open-source transparency. We also published a full PhotoCraft review comparing it with Photoshop, GIMP and Photopea.
Key Features
- Real PSD and PSB files — open, edit and save layered Photoshop documents. Re-saving renders the same for 307 of 309 files in the psd-tools test corpus, and unsupported data is carried over instead of dropped. 16-bit, 32-bit, CMYK and Lab documents open natively.
- Photoshop-shaped UX — menus, panels, tools and shortcuts sit where Photoshop users expect, from Cmd+J to Shift+Cmd+D. If you know Photoshop, you already know PhotoCraft.
- Native and fast — a GPU compositor built on wgpu (Metal, Vulkan, DirectX 12, WebGPU) with copy-on-write tiles and multithreaded filters. No Electron, no web view.
- Broad format support — PSD, PSB, layered TIFF, SVG, PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, BMP, TGA, ICO, QOI, PNM, OpenEXR, Radiance HDR, AVIF and more, with 8/16/32-bit symmetric read and write. Affinity documents (.afphoto, .afdesign, .afpub) open read-only.
- Agent-ready — every action is a command, drivable from the UI, the CLI, a JSON control channel or an MCP server.
- Runs everywhere — native builds for macOS, Windows and Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm, Flatpak, FreeBSD), plus a WebAssembly build for the browser.
Current Status: Early Alpha
PhotoCraft is honest about where it stands: version 0.5.0 is early alpha. Much of Photoshop's feature surface exists in some form, but generative AI features, roughly twenty tools, advanced typography depth and plug-in compatibility are not there yet. For everyday layered editing, retouching and PSD hand-offs it already works; professionals should run it alongside their current tools.
PhotoCraft vs Photoshop vs GIMP vs Photopea
- PhotoCraft — free, open source, native, Photoshop-style UI, strong PSD round-trips. Young (early alpha), no generative AI yet.
- Photoshop — industry standard, full feature set and Firefly AI, subscription-only with an Adobe ID requirement.
- GIMP — mature and open source (GPL) with its own interface paradigm and partial PSD support.
- Photopea — free with ads, closed source, runs in the browser, very Photoshop-like.
PhotoCraft's niche is the combination: free + open source + native + offline + Photoshop-shaped, which no other editor currently offers together.
