photocraft
An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Oct 2026
PhotoCraft is a Photoshop lookalike written from scratch in Rust: same menus, same shortcuts, layers, masks, adjustment layers and layer styles, and it opens and saves real PSD files. It runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and in the browser, free under MIT or Apache 2.0, your pick.
There's nothing to host. Download an installer and go; Mac and Windows builds are now signed. It also reads Krita, Paint.NET and Affinity files, loads Photoshop actions (.atn), and ships a command line tool and an MCP server, so an AI agent can drive the same commands the menus use.
Hobbyists who just need to open a PSD without paying Adobe should try it now. Professionals shouldn't switch yet; the team's own roadmap rates it about 45% ready for real work, with about a dozen tools still missing, no generative fill and no .8BF plug-in support. GIMP and Krita are the mature free options.
The catch: it launched in October 2026 and users file bug reports by the hundreds. Much of the code was written with Claude, which has people questioning the "clean-room" label. It's also the free front door to ArtCraft, the team's AI image and video studio, where subscriptions are optional, and nothing here is gated.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree: Everything. Dual licensed MIT OR Apache-2.0 (GitHub's badge shows only Apache-2.0 because it reads one of the two license files), no account, no paid tier. The ArtCraft logos are trademarked and must be removed from modified builds you distribute.
Self-hosted: Nothing to host. Desktop builds for macOS (signed and notarized), Windows (x64, arm64 and 32-bit MSI or portable zip, code-signed), Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm, Flatpak, tarball on x86_64 and aarch64, plus riscv64) and FreeBSD, plus a WebAssembly build you can serve yourself, with a Docker recipe for that in the repo.
Paid: None for PhotoCraft. The same team sells ArtCraft, a separate AI image and video generation studio on monthly credits: Basic $10, Pro $35 and Max $60 a month billed monthly (a 20%-off promo on $13, $44 and $75), or $8, $28 and $48 a month billed yearly ($96, $336 and $576 a year). ArtCraft is itself Apache-2.0 and subscriptions are optional. It unlocks nothing in PhotoCraft, which has no AI or generative features today. Versus Photoshop, the maintainers rate PhotoCraft about 45% ready for real work, so keep Photoshop for client work.
Free under MIT or Apache 2.0 with no paid tier. Still alpha: fine for hobby edits and opening PSDs, not a professional Photoshop replacement yet.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; good for hobby edits and opening PSDs without Adobe
- Small team
- free to try, but keep Photoshop for client work while it's in alpha
- Medium team
- Not ready for production design work yet; revisit in a few releases
- Large team
- Not ready: no .8BF plug-ins or UXP panels, and actions support is partial
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License: MIT OR Apache-2.0
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