PhotoCraft vs Photoshop: How Close Is the Open-Source Rust Editor in 2026?

PhotoCraft vs Photoshop is a comparison between a decades-old industry standard and a project whose repository was created at the end of September 2026. Photoshop is the safer choice for paid, deadline-driven work today. PhotoCraft is the more interesting one to watch if you want a Photoshop-shaped editor that is free to inspect, runs offline and can be driven by scripts and AI agents.

The gap is not hidden. PhotoCraft's own README says it is in early alpha and "not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work". This guide takes that statement seriously and compares the two on what the project documents, what Enlisted's catalogue records and what Adobe publishes about Photoshop.

What PhotoCraft is

PhotoCraft is an image editor written entirely in Rust by the ArtCraft team, the group behind the ArtCraft AI image and video studio. It is described as a clean-room reimplementation of Photoshop: built from public specifications and observed behaviour, without Adobe code, shaders or assets. It is one of a family of apps listed in the ArtCraft Crafting Apps guide, alongside VectorCraft for illustration and LightCraft for raw photo development.

It runs natively on macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, and the same engine compiles to WebAssembly so it also runs in a browser. There is no Electron shell or web view: the interface is built with egui and the canvas is composited on the GPU through wgpu.

The licence is stated as MIT or Apache-2.0 at your option, which is a permissive pair. GitHub detects the Apache-2.0 file. The project's name, wordmark and logos are trademarks and are excluded from that licence.

What Photoshop is

Adobe Photoshop is a closed-source raster editor sold on subscription through Adobe's Creative Cloud. It is the reference implementation of the PSD format, it has the largest ecosystem of plug-ins, tutorials and trained professionals, and in recent releases it has added generative AI features that run on Adobe's cloud services.

Adobe does not publish a self-hosted edition, and the subscription model means the software is rented rather than owned. The live pricing table further down this page shows the plan data in Enlisted's catalogue.

Feature comparison

The table below shows catalogue data side by side with two established open-source editors, GIMP and Krita, and with Affinity as a commercial alternative.

Behind the table, the practical differences are these.

Layers, masks and non-destructive work

PhotoCraft lists groups, clipping masks, pixel and vector masks, fill layers, adjustment layers (Levels, Curves, Vibrance, Hue/Saturation and more), live smart objects with smart filters, 27 blend modes, alpha channels and Quick Mask. For a Photoshop user that is the core of the daily workflow, and it is the area where the project looks most complete on paper.

Layer styles are covered too: Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, glows, Bevel and Emboss, Satin, Stroke and the three overlay types, usable on type layers as well.

Selections, retouching and filters

The tool list includes the marquees and lassos, Magic Wand, Quick Selection, Object Selection, Select Subject, Select and Mask, Clone Stamp, Healing and Spot Healing brushes, Dodge, Burn and Sponge, plus a long filter set with live previews: Gaussian and motion blurs, the Blur Gallery, sharpening, Reduce Noise, distortions, Oil Paint and Lighting Effects. Filters on smart objects remain editable.

The README's own gap list says about twenty tools are still missing, and "exists" is not "behaves identically". PhotoCraft tracks parity by checking that every Photoshop menu item is wired to a command, and it states plainly that this measures wiring, not behaviour.

PSD compatibility

PSD support is where PhotoCraft puts much of its effort. It reads and writes PSD and PSB documents and layered TIFF, and it carries over data it does not model yet instead of dropping it. The README reports that opening and re-saving keeps the render of 307 of the 309 files in the psd-tools test set, and describes a comparison against Photoshop's own merged image for gradients, layer effects and shape strokes.

It also says a re-saved file is not byte-identical to the source. If you exchange PSDs with Photoshop users, treat PhotoCraft as something to try on copies, not as a drop-in for client deliveries.

Colour and bit depth

PhotoCraft supports RGB, Grayscale, CMYK and Lab documents at 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel, with ICC profile assignment and conversion, all four rendering intents, black point compensation, soft proofing and a gamut warning. That puts it ahead of what many free editors offer for print-oriented work, though the README does not claim print-house validation.

AI and generative features

Photoshop's cloud generative tools have no direct equivalent in PhotoCraft. The README names AI and generative features as the largest gap. Selection helpers run locally, with no cloud and no account.

If generative image work is the goal, the same team's ArtCraft studio is aimed at that job rather than PhotoCraft.

Automation and agents

Every menu item and tool in PhotoCraft runs a command from a registry of more than 500. The same commands are reachable from the UI, a command-line tool, a JSON control channel and an MCP server, so a script or an AI agent can open a PSD, apply adjustment layers and export. Photoshop offers its own scripting and actions, but PhotoCraft's single command layer is a deliberate design choice and a differentiator for batch and agent workflows.

Getting it and trying it

PhotoCraft's installers are attached to each GitHub release for macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the web. On Linux the README lists an AppImage, a .deb, an .rpm, a tarball and a Flatpak bundle, and on macOS the command-line tool is signed and notarized. Building from source needs a Rust toolchain and one command, which opens a PSD directly in the desktop app.

The command-line tool is the quickest way to judge the engine. It can open a document, run a chain of commands such as a smart sharpen and a new Curves adjustment layer, and write a PNG. A batch command applies one action list to a whole folder of images. A loopback-only JSON control channel can inspect the interface and take offscreen screenshots, and the README says every image in it was rendered that way.

Testing and security

The project says it has more than 1,700 tests, covering PSD round trips, synthetic generators, compositor oracles and multi-depth checks. Its architecture keeps a pure-data document model and a command engine under a thin interface, spread across 24 crates with layering enforced at build time. A CPU compositor serves as the reference and the GPU compositor is tested against it. Pixels are held in 256-pixel copy-on-write tiles, which keeps undo cheap and large canvases light.

PSD support lives in a standalone crate. The README says that crate, when it parses and writes a file without the document model, reproduces every parseable file in its corpus byte for byte. The full editor does not make that promise, because it rewrites image resources, layer records and the composite.

Security documentation covers threat modelling, parser hardening and fuzzing, with a security policy for reporting vulnerabilities. For a program that opens image files from other people, that is the right place to document effort. It does not replace a long track record, which only time provides.

Maturity and risk

The risks with PhotoCraft are the usual ones for a young project: bugs, missing tools, thin documentation of edge cases and a roadmap that can change. The positives are real too: the source is readable, the licence is permissive, and the maintainers publish a candid parity assessment rather than a marketing claim.

Which to choose

Choose Photoshop if you deliver files to clients who expect Photoshop behaviour, depend on third-party plug-ins, or need generative tools in the same app.

Choose PhotoCraft if you want to follow or contribute to an open Photoshop-style editor, need an offline editor that agents can script, or want to study how a modern layered editor is built.

Choose GIMP or Krita if you want a free open-source editor you can rely on today. GIMP is the general-purpose option and Krita is the stronger fit for painting. Our free Photoshop alternatives guide covers more options, and the design category lists the rest of the open-source field.