Rust clean-room replacements for Photoshop

ArtCraft released PhotoCraft, an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop written entirely in Rust, offering layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, type, vectors, brushes and native PSD support. PhotoCraft round-trips 134 of 135 real-world PSD files byte for byte and runs a GPU compositor on wgpu across Metal, Vulkan, DX12 and WebGPU, with every action exposed as a command drivable from the UI, CLI, a JSON control channel or an MCP server.

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. PhotoCraft on getartcraft.com https://getartcraft.com/apps/photocraft · ArtCraft https://getartcraft.com/ · All Crafting Apps https://getartcraft.com/apps <sub 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</sub Note ArtCraft is a community of artists from all walks of life. Digital, generative, music, games — if you make things, you're one of us. Come say hi on Discord https://discord.gg/artcraft . Features features · Everything in the box everything-in-the-box · PSD psd-without-compromise · Agents built-for-agents · Under the hood under-the-hood · Get started get-started · Crafting Apps the-crafting-apps · Discord https://discord.gg/artcraft | The menus, shortcuts, panels and tools are where your hands expect them, from ⌘J to ⇧⌘D. If you know Photoshop, you already know PhotoCraft. | A GPU compositor on wgpu Metal, Vulkan, DX12, WebGPU , copy-on-write tiles and multithreaded filters. No Electron, no web view, no waiting. | Open, edit and save layered Photoshop documents. 134 of 135 real-world PSDs round-trip byte for byte. | Every action is a command, so you can drive the same engine from the UI, the CLI, a JSON control channel or an MCP server. | Every screenshot here is the real app at work on public-domain art, rendered offscreen through its control channel. | <sub Levels and Vibrance adjustment layers, with the live Histogram panel. Impression, Sunrise , Claude Monet, 1872</sub 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. | <sub Outer Glow and Stroke on a live type layer, in the Layer Style dialog. Earthrise , William Anders / NASA, 1968</sub 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. | | <sub 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</sub 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. | <sub A headline edited in place, with a byline and a paragraph of body text. Among the Sierra Nevada, California , Albert Bierstadt, 1868</sub Point and paragraph text, edited right on the canvas, with full Character and Paragraph controls: font, weight, size, leading, tracking, alignment and colour.Type layers stay editable, take layer styles, and round-trip through PSD. | | <sub A badge made of shape layers: a gradient-filled lotus, a star and a dotted ring. Water Lilies , Claude Monet, 1906</sub Rectangle, Ellipse, Triangle, Polygon, Line and the Pen tool, 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. | <sub Twirl previews live on the canvas, only inside the selection. The Starry Night , Vincent van Gogh, 1889</sub 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. | | <sub Free Transform on a rotated print, with every step listed in History. The Tetons and the Snake River , Ansel Adams, 1942</sub 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. | <sub Export As in the light theme, with a preview and a file-size estimate. The Kiss , Gustav Klimt, 1907–1908</sub 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. | | Move · Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee · Lasso · Polygonal Lasso · Magic Wand · Quick Selection · Object Selection · Crop · Eyedropper · Brush · Pencil · Mixer Brush · Color Replacement · Eraser · Clone Stamp · Healing Brush · Spot Healing · History Brush · Gradient · Paint Bucket · Blur · Sharpen · Smudge · Dodge · Burn · Sponge · Pen · Path Selection · Type · five Shape tools · Hand · Zoom | Shape Dynamics, Scattering, Texture, Dual Brush, Color Dynamics, Transfer, Brush Pose, Wet Edges, Build-up and Smoothing including Pulled String , driven by pen pressure, tilt, rotation and direction. Brush presets, Define Brush from Selection, and deterministic, replayable strokes. | Groups, clipping masks, pixel and vector masks, fill layers solid, gradient and pattern , adjustment layers, live smart objects with smart filters and lossless transforms and warps, multi-layer selection with align, distribute and link, alpha channels and Quick Mask, 27 blend modes, opacity and fill, locks, colour labels, layer filters, merge, flatten, rasterize, Layer via Copy/Cut, Paste Into. | | RGB, Grayscale, CMYK and Lab documents at 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel. Bit depth and colour model are runtime data, so every tool works at every depth. Real ICC colour management in pure Rust: embedded profiles, Assign and Convert to Profile with all four rendering intents and black point compensation, soft proofing ⌘Y and Gamut Warning ⇧⌘Y on the GPU. | PSD and PSB, plus PNG, JPEG, TIFF, WebP, GIF, BMP, TGA, ICO, QOI, PNM, OpenEXR, Radiance HDR and AVIF, with symmetric read and write at 8, 16 and 32 bits, and the native .pcraft format. | Auto Tone, Contrast and Color · Equalize · Image and Canvas Size · Crop and Trim · Reveal All · Edit › Fill and Stroke · Copy Merged · Paste in Place · guides, rulers, grid and snapping · Actions record and replay · a command palette ⌘K . | PhotoCraft's PSD support is a standalone crate written from Adobe's public specification and tested against a corpus of real-world files. - Byte-exact round trips: 134 of 135 corpus files are written back identical, and anything we don't model yet raw blocks, descriptors, extras is preserved verbatim instead of being dropped. - 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. 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 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 https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs/control-protocol.md . - 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. git clone https://github.com/storytold/photocraft cd photocraft cargo run --release -p photocraft -- image.psd the desktop app cargo test --workspace the test suite New contributors and AI agents: start with AGENTS.md https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/AGENTS.md , then docs/ https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs . Installers for macOS, Windows, Linux and the web are attached to each GitHub release https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/releases . Maintainers: docs/releasing.md https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs/releasing.md explains how releases are built, signed and published. Important Status: PhotoCraft is in early alpha. The core editing workflow is here, and we're working toward full Photoshop parity milestone by milestone see docs/roadmap.md https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs/roadmap.md . Progress is measured, not guessed: cargo xtask parity checks every item in Photoshop's menu tree against the live command registry and writes docs/parity.md https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs/parity.md . Expect rough edges, and please file issues. You can also tell us what broke on Discord https://discord.gg/artcraft . Developer, architecture, automation, format, and security documentation is maintained in the PhotoCraft documentation book https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/book . Security architecture, threat modeling, parser hardening, fuzzing, and vulnerability reporting are covered in the security documentation https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/book/src/security and the repository security policy https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/SECURITY.md . PhotoCraft is one of the Crafting Apps : free, open-source creative tools from the ArtCraft https://getartcraft.com/ team, each written from scratch in Rust and each able to stand on its own. | | App | What it's for | Code | Learn more | |---|---|---|---|---| | | PhotoCraft | Image editing: layers, masks, type and real PSD files · you are here | GitHub https://github.com/storytold/photocraft | Website https://getartcraft.com/apps/photocraft | | | VectorCraft | Vector illustration | GitHub https://github.com/storytold/vectorcraft | Website https://getartcraft.com/apps/vectorcraft | | | FilmCraft | Video editing, color and sound | GitHub https://github.com/storytold/filmcraft | Website https://getartcraft.com/apps/filmcraft | | | LightCraft | Photo library and raw development | GitHub https://github.com/storytold/lightcraft | Website https://getartcraft.com/apps/lightcraft | | | PrintCraft | Reading, organizing and protecting PDFs | GitHub https://github.com/storytold/printcraft | Website https://getartcraft.com/apps/printcraft | | | EffectCraft | Motion graphics and visual effects | GitHub https://github.com/storytold/effectcraft | Website https://getartcraft.com/apps/effectcraft | | | DesignCraft | Page layout and publishing | GitHub https://github.com/storytold/designcraft | Website https://getartcraft.com/apps/designcraft | And ArtCraft https://getartcraft.com/ itself, our AI image and video studio for artists who want real control. The Crafting Apps share the same conventions: clean-room and pure Rust, native on macOS, Windows and Linux, in the browser via WebAssembly, and fully drivable by agents. Our Discord is where artists of every kind hang out: people who paint, shoot, draw, cut film, set type, and people still figuring out what they like to make. Share what you're working on, ask for help, tell us what's broken, or tell us what you wish these tools could do. Whatever your medium and however long you've been at it, you're welcome here. discord.gg/artcraft https://discord.gg/artcraft · getartcraft.com https://getartcraft.com/ · The Crafting Apps https://getartcraft.com/apps · PhotoCraft https://getartcraft.com/apps/photocraft PhotoCraft is dual-licensed under MIT https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/LICENSE-MIT or Apache-2.0 https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/LICENSE-APACHE , at your option. Copyright c 2026 ArtCraft Team and the PhotoCraft contributors. Required notices are in NOTICE https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/NOTICE . 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 https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/ATTRIBUTION.md . Every artwork shown is in the public domain Wikimedia Commons, NASA, U.S. National Archives ; sources are listed in docs/images/SOURCES.md https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs/images/SOURCES.md . The ArtCraft name, wordmark and logos in docs/brand/ https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs/brand are trademarks of the ArtCraft Team and are not covered by this license. They may be used only unmodified, and only as part of this repository and PhotoCraft, under docs/brand/LICENSE-brand.txt https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs/brand/LICENSE-brand.txt . Forks and modified versions must remove them. <sub 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.</sub <sub Made by the ArtCraft https://getartcraft.com/ team and community.</sub ArtCraft