PhotoCraft

Image editing; an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop, rebuilt in pure Rust.
Layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, type, vectors, brushes and real PSD files,
in a native app written entirely in Rust. Open source, offline, and yours.

Built on the official PhotoCraft by the ArtCraft team; this edition is not published or endorsed by them.

_{A caption card with a drop shadow, live type, and Vibrance and Curves adjustment layers, with the Curves editor open.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Katsushika Hokusai, c. 1831}

What this edition adds · Features · Everything in the box · PSD · Agents · Under the hood · Get started · Downloads

Run it locally, step by step

1. Install Rust, the WebAssembly target and Trunk:

   rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
   cargo install trunk --version 0.21.14 --locked
   

2. Get the code:

   git clone https://github.com/Gitguy268/better-photocraft-web.git
   cd better-photocraft-web
   

3. On a Mac, double-click start.command. It builds the web version and serves it. Anywhere else, run trunk build --release in apps/photocraft-web and serve dist/web with any web server.

4. Open http://localhost:8780/ in your browser. Press Ctrl+C in the terminal to stop.

What this edition adds

This is PhotoCraft 0.7.0 with additions (version 0.7.0-better.1): the same app, name, menus and tools as the official release, plus the following. Details, what answers which upstream issue and what is not finished: docs/better-roadmap.md and CHANGELOG.md.

_{Asked before any download; then one click. The result is a layer mask, so nothing is destroyed.
Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665 · Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1503–1519}

rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
cargo install trunk --version 0.21.14 --locked     # the pinned version; wasm-opt comes from binaryen
cd apps/photocraft-web
trunk build --release                              # writes ../../dist/web (also builds the AI worker)
python3 -m http.server 8780 -d ../../dist/web      # then open http://localhost:8780/

Features

Every screenshot here is the real app at work on public-domain art, rendered offscreen through its control channel.

Levels and Vibrance adjustment layers, with the live Histogram panel. Impression, Sunrise, Claude Monet, 1872 Edit without regret Adjustment layers keep every edit live. Stack Levels, Curves, Vibrance, Hue/Saturation and a dozen more, mask them to an area, reorder them, or turn them off, and your original pixels never change. 16 adjustment layers that also apply directly to pixels, including Curves with per-channel editing, Levels with a live histogram, Black & White, Channel Mixer, Gradient Map, Photo Filter, Selective Color and Color Lookup (.cube, .3dl, .look). Plus Shadows/Highlights, Replace Color, Match Color, HDR Toning, Desaturate and Equalize.	Outer Glow and Stroke on a live type layer, in the Layer Style dialog. Earthrise, William Anders / NASA, 1968 Styles that sell the shot Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer and Inner Glow, Bevel & Emboss, Satin, Stroke, and Color, Gradient and Pattern Overlay, live on any layer, including type. Patterns come from a library (built-ins, Edit › Define Pattern, .pat import/export) and PSD Patt blocks. Copy and paste styles between layers, hide all effects at once, and open styles straight from your PSDs, rendered to match Photoshop.
An elliptical selection becomes the mask of a Hue/Saturation layer, so only the face keeps its color. Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665 Selections that understand your image Marquees, lassos and the Magic Wand for precision; Quick Selection, Object Selection and Select Subject when you want the computer to do the tracing; Select and Mask to refine hair-fine edges. Feather, expand, contract, smooth, grow, reselect. Turn any selection into a layer mask, a vector path or a shape. Smart selection runs on your machine, with no cloud and no account.	A headline edited in place, with a byline and a paragraph of body text. Among the Sierra Nevada, California, Albert Bierstadt, 1868 Type that sets beautifully Point and paragraph text, edited right on the canvas, with full Character and Paragraph controls: font, weight, size, leading, tracking, alignment and colour. The full Type Color Picker also supports screen sampling with a pixel loupe. Type layers stay editable, take layer styles, and round-trip through PSD.
A badge made of shape layers: a gradient-filled lotus, a star and a dotted ring. Water Lilies, Claude Monet, 1906 Pixel-perfect vectors Rectangle, Ellipse, Triangle, Polygon, Line and the Pen, Freeform Pen and Curvature Pen tools, with resolution-independent shape layers, gradient fills, and dashed, aligned strokes. Combine shapes (unite, subtract, intersect, exclude), keep paths in the Paths panel, use them as vector masks, or stroke and fill them. 116 of 116 shape layers in our PSD corpus match Photoshop's pixels.	Twirl previews live on the canvas, only inside the selection. The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889 See it before you commit Every filter dialog previews live on the canvas, through your selection. Blurs (Gaussian, Box, Motion, Radial, Surface, Smart, Lens, Shape, and the Blur Gallery: Tilt-Shift, Iris, Field, Spin, Path), sharpening, Reduce Noise, distortions (Twirl, Wave, Ripple, Displace, Shear, Zig Zag…), Pixelate, Stylize (Oil Paint, Wind, Extrude…), Render (Clouds, Fibers, Lens Flare, Lighting Effects) and more. Run filters on a smart object and they stay editable: change, hide, reorder or mask them at any time. Large-radius blurs use running-sum box passes across all cores: a radius-180 Gaussian on 3.6 MP takes under a second.
Free Transform on a rotated print, with every step listed in History. The Tetons and the Snake River, Ansel Adams, 1942 Shape it any way you like Free Transform with scale, rotate, skew, distort and perspective; exact 90° and 180° rotations and flips; Transform Again. Layers, type, shapes, masks and selections all transform together. Full history, Toggle Last State and the History Brush mean every step can be undone, even one brush stroke at a time.	Export As in the light theme, with a preview and a file-size estimate. The Kiss, Gustav Klimt, 1907–1908 Ship it anywhere Export As with format, quality, transparency and scale, plus a preview and an instant file-size estimate. Quick Export to PNG in one click. Choose a dark Pro theme, the airy Studio themes, or a Classic look.

Everything in the box

PSD without compromise

PhotoCraft's PSD support is a standalone crate written from Adobe's public specification and tested against a corpus of real-world files.

• Faithful round trips: opening and re-saving a document renders the same for 307 of the 309 files in the psd-tools test set and 169 of 170 in our mixed ag-psd/psd-tools set (crates/io/tests/it/corpus.rs; fetch the psd-tools set with cargo xtask corpus --psd-tools), and anything we don't model yet (raw blocks, descriptors, extras) is carried over instead of being dropped. A re-saved file is not byte-identical to its source: PhotoCraft rewrites image resources, layer records and the composite. Only the standalone photocraft-psd crate, parsing and writing a file without the document model, reproduces every parseable corpus file byte for byte (crates/psd/tests/it/corpus.rs).
• Pixels that match: a composite oracle compares our render with Photoshop's own merged image, covering gradient interpolation (Classic, Perceptual and Linear), layer effects, shape strokes, clipping and fill opacity.
• Large documents: PSB, 16 and 32-bit files, and CMYK and Lab documents open natively.

Built for agents

Every menu item, tool and dialog runs a command from one registry of 500+ commands. The UI, the CLI, the JSON control channel and the MCP server all call the same commands, so anything you can click, a script or an AI agent can do too.

# 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

# Every subcommand explains itself
photocraft-cli batch --help

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

The desktop app also offers an authenticated, loopback-only control channel (photocraft --control) for inspecting UI state, driving tools with pointer events, and taking offscreen screenshots. Every image in this README was rendered that way. See docs/control-protocol.md.

Under the hood

• Engine first: a pure-data document model and a command engine, with a thin egui UI on top. Layering is enforced at build time across 24 crates.
• Two compositors: a CPU compositor serves as the reference oracle, and a wgpu compositor puts the canvas on the GPU. They are tested against each other.
• Copy-on-write tiles: 256² sparse tiles make undo cheap and huge canvases light, and effect maps are cached per layer state.
• Runs in the browser: the whole engine and UI compile to WebAssembly.
• Clean-room: implemented from public specs and observed behaviour only. No proprietary code, shaders or assets.
• Tested: more than 1,700 tests, including PSD round trips, synthetic generators, compositor oracles and multi-depth checks.

Get started

git clone https://github.com/TODO-USERNAME/Better-Photocraft-Web
cd Better-Photocraft-Web
cargo run --release -p photocraft -- image.psd   # the desktop app
cargo test --workspace                           # the test suite

Japanese fonts for the UI and Type tool come from craft-fonts, an optional build input (desktop release builds always include it). Without it PhotoCraft uses your system's CJK fonts:

git clone https://github.com/storytold/craft-fonts ../craft-fonts
CRAFT_FONTS_DIR="$PWD/../craft-fonts" cargo run --release -p photocraft

New contributors and AI agents: start with AGENTS.md, then docs/.

Installers for macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the web are attached to each GitHub release. On Linux you can pick an AppImage, a .deb, an .rpm, a tarball or a Flatpak bundle. The bundle needs the freedesktop runtime from Flathub, which flatpak offers to install along with it:

flatpak install --user photocraft-<version>-linux-x86_64.flatpak   # or -linux-aarch64
flatpak run ai.storyteller.photocraft

The Flatpak prints through the host's CUPS socket (File › Print talks IPP to it directly, no lp needed); without CUPS, or without a printer, File › Print opens the system print dialog through the print portal. See printing.

The AppImage needs no install: the first run registers its launcher icon and menu entry in ~/.local/share so the dock shows PhotoCraft's icon on Wayland. Set PHOTOCRAFT_NO_DESKTOP_INTEGRATION=1 to skip that, and see docs/releasing.md › Linux to undo it.

On a Wayland session, files dropped on the window don't open yet: winit 0.30, the windowing library under egui, has no Wayland drag and drop (#386). Use File › Open, or copy the image in your file manager and paste it with Ctrl+V. To drag and drop, start PhotoCraft under XWayland: WAYLAND_DISPLAY= photocraft, WAYLAND_DISPLAY= ./photocraft-<version>-linux-x86_64.AppImage, or flatpak run --nosocket=wayland --socket=x11 ai.storyteller.photocraft. On Wayland, PhotoCraft shows the command for your install in a notice until you dismiss it. Preferences › Performance › Linux display server = X11 does the same on every launch. With a fractional display scale (125%, 150%, 175%) an XWayland window is drawn at a lower resolution and enlarged by the compositor, so the interface is blurred there; native Wayland stays sharp (#1072).

On macOS, the command-line tool comes as photocraft-cli-<version>-macos-universal.zip. The binary is signed with the same Developer ID as the app and notarized by Apple. A bare binary can't carry a stapled notarization ticket the way the DMG does, so the first time you run it macOS checks the notarization online. You can confirm it yourself:

ditto -x -k photocraft-cli-<version>-macos-universal.zip .
spctl --assess --type install -vv photocraft-cli-<version>-macos-universal/photocraft-cli
# ... accepted, source=Notarized Developer ID

On FreeBSD 14 (x86_64), the release has a tarball laid out like /usr/local. Install the runtime libraries, then unpack it there:

pkg install libxkbcommon wayland libX11 libXcursor libXrandr libXi libxcb mesa-libs vulkan-loader gtk3 fontconfig freetype2 alsa-lib
tar -xzf photocraft-<version>-freebsd-x86_64.tar.gz --strip-components 1 -C /usr/local
photocraft

Maintainers: docs/releasing.md explains how releases are built, signed and published.

[!IMPORTANT] Status: PhotoCraft is in early alpha, and we want to be straight about where it stands: much of Photoshop's feature surface exists in some form, but it is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work. The biggest gaps are AI/generative features, 15 missing tools, depth in typography and pro workflows, and plug-in compatibility. Every Photoshop menu item is wired to a command (docs/parity-checklist.md), but that measures wiring, not behaviour. The honest, dimension-by-dimension picture and where we're going next are in the roadmap and parity assessment. Expect rough edges, and please file issues (include your OS, document size, layer count and a screenshot). You can also tell us what broke on Discord.

Community packages

These installers are maintained by community members, not by the PhotoCraft team.

On Gentoo, the ::snakebyte overlay packages the Linux release as media-gfx/photocraft-bin:

eselect repository add snakebyte git https://github.com/switch87/snakebyte-overlay.git
emaint sync -r snakebyte
echo 'media-gfx/photocraft-bin ~amd64' >> /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/photocraft
emerge --ask media-gfx/photocraft-bin

Documentation

Developer, architecture, automation, format, and security documentation is maintained in the PhotoCraft documentation book.

To self-host the browser version with Docker, see Docker web hosting.

Security

Security architecture, threat modeling, parser hardening, fuzzing, and vulnerability reporting are covered in the security documentation and the repository security policy.

Test corpora

PhotoCraft is tested against real files: our own Photoshop-authored oracle PSDs in photocraft-corpus plus the psd-tools, ag-psd and PngSuite sets, pinned and sha256-verified. Fetch them with cargo xtask corpus --all and run the tests with cargo xtask test-corpus (details in docs/development.md).

Downloads

This edition has no published builds yet: build it from source (above). The tables below describe the official PhotoCraft builds, which do not contain this edition's additions; get those from the official releases. <ver> in the file names is the version.

Windows

Installers and executables are code-signed.

macOS

Linux

RISC-V (riscv64): photocraft-<ver>-linux-riscv64.tar.gz only, built against Ubuntu 24.04 (needs glibc 2.39+).

FreeBSD

Web (WebAssembly)

License and credits

This edition is licensed under the MIT License. Upstream PhotoCraft is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0; this edition uses the MIT option. Copyright (c) 2026 ArtCraft Team and the PhotoCraft contributors, and (for the changes made here) Copyright (c) 2026 Better-Photocraft-Web contributors. Required notices are in NOTICE.

Credit where it is due: PhotoCraft is the work of the ArtCraft team and the PhotoCraft contributors. Built on the official PhotoCraft by the ArtCraft team; this edition is not published or endorsed by them. Bugs in what this edition adds belong here, not in upstream's tracker.

Bundled fonts, icons, images and other assets keep their own open licenses; each one is listed with its author, source and license in ATTRIBUTION.md. AI models are never bundled: they are downloaded on request, each under its own license (docs/ai-models.md).

Every artwork shown is in the public domain (Wikimedia Commons, NASA, U.S. National Archives); sources are listed in docs/images/SOURCES.md.

The ArtCraft name, wordmark and logos are trademarks of the ArtCraft Team. Upstream requires modified versions to remove them, so this edition does not use them.

The Liquid Glass theme is original work inspired by frosted-glass interface styles; its lens rims adapt the optics of liquid-glass-studio by Charles Yin (MIT, see ATTRIBUTION.md). It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple Inc., and uses no Apple assets or code.

_{Adobe, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects and InDesign are trademarks or registered trademarks of Adobe Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. PhotoCraft is an independent, open-source project and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Adobe Inc.; these names are used only to describe the workflows it is compatible with.}