ArtCraft Apps – open-source Adobe compatible suite written in Rust
getartcraft.com
getartcraft.com
Overall, looks like a cool project. Looking forward to the *Craft repos on github gaining traction
I think the same thing about the endless proliferation of Web-dev frameworks. Why bother? Just have AI write it in native JS or WebAssembly and be done with it.
What about their service?
But then I remembered that the flight had free Internet. So I log in... only to have these morons try to TEXT my phone a 2FA code. On the plane.
After I got back I checked with our IT department and found that our Adobe licenses are paid up for TWO YEARS.
Despicable.
Photoshop has a lot of bad things going for it, but it’s still the only software that does what it does, and I’ve tried all the competitors that have popped up over the years.
It's not that different from having Claude go to a website and sniff all the API calls it makes as you're interacting with it and then using that info to create a website that you prefer interacting with and all the layers and interactive components that you like.
I think this project is interesting, but it's more a wait and see what happens kind of thing.
Every Crafting App is written from scratch in Rust and held to the same rules."
Yes. We are numb to AI (slop). Maybe if this project is still being developed in a year people might take it seriously.
Just curious, because I've worked within design/film etc. for years.
I did open the PhotoCraft and loaded a few of my simpler layout projects. And literally nothing works.
Let's see:
1. Tried to select text, like the selector is off from the cursor.
2. Tried to edit text, takes like 3 seconds to drag the slider for size, nothing happens (text doesn't change size).
3. Absolutely everything is insanely laggy: selecting, switching, etc.
4. Can't seem to expand/collapse folders.
5. Everything shows shortcut keys - shortcut keys don't do anything.
6. Tried to move something, it kind of got frozen for a while. Eventually disappeared I think?
7. Clicked something and it auto selected a side panel (don't know why), hid the other panel, can't stretch, collapse the panels or get it back...
This is actual joke software, I'm confused why you are impressed?
I checked GitHub and it has only two committers and four weeks effort: One person +550k lines, another +3k lines.
Now here we see a fully blown suite which is already alarming for basic testability.
Also, we had several apps targeting directly at Adobe in the past.
* Blackmagic DaVinci is the biggest, and it also bought several companies to start fusing a one-stop solution.
* Affinity also started with single app that got attention before being swallowed into Canva.
Leaving compatibility and ui-workflow (which is important to existing users), It's much more sane to start and focus on a single app instead of a fully blown package.
From Adobe/Creative Cloud users, I do know Acrobat Pro is one of the problematic apps they have in terms (it freezes, guess a lot of legacy code, etc). And yet, even where there is some competition on PDF editors, Acrobat is still strong also due to UX and features.
I heard from another Photoshop clone that they spent almost a year to polish the software, using AI nonetheless. The hardest part they told me is the getting the color management part right.
That for one app. A full suit with a “written in Rust” tag sounds today almost like a clickbait.
Creative apps don’t fit in either of those categories.
A house of mirrors.
The fact that this does everything it does is super impressive.
Yeah, I got totally numb to AI slop. I looked at it and thought, this is surely so broken that nothing works. Came for the comments and the folks who actually had the time to invest in trying it out confirm that nothing works.
Serious publishers don't want a photo editing program in their UI.
That's not how it works; when you're in the Layout Studio, that's your UI and nothing else.
I think the confusion is that some tools appear in the Layout Studio and the Pixel Studio because they make sense in those contexts.
Affinity lets you customize each Studio and the overall UI to your heart's content [1].
[1]: https://www.affinity.studio/help/workspace-about-studios/#cu...
I have all 3 versions installed, but most of the time I reach for Affinity Photo V1 just because it will launch faster. If I need Designer, I reach for Affinity Designer V2.
Nothing has been enshittified, and indeed if you knew anything about Affinity, the fact that they chose that name, had a three pointed logo and a single shared file architecture, and the way they have talked about the integration in the suite, you would have predicted this for v3 whether or not Canva bought them. This integration was always going to happen.
Absolutely not.
Affinity just released an update [1] that delivered features like the Blend Tool that users have wanted for years. Cost: $0.
In addition to MCP support, users can now automate the Affinity suite using JavaScript [2].
[1]: https://www.affinity.studio/help/release-notes/
[2]: https://www.affinity.studio/help/scripting-in-affinity/
It’s not a simple port, is it? The iPad apps have significantly different UI and a more iPadOS-ish UX, and their release has always lagged (though, ironically, Affinity started out as an iPad project within Serif; the hardware wasn’t ready so they pivoted to the Mac, but things like canvas rotation were still tested first on the iPad for feasibility)
Yes, even hardware acceleration works.
The Adobe apps are 100% open source, desktop, MIT, no telemetry.
Nope. I just downloaded and installed PhotoCraft [1] and launched it. No sign-up, dialog boxes, licensing agreement.
The installer for LightCraft [2] isn't ready yet; building it from source took about 5 minutes.
Adobe to $120 price target at least, could be even lower.
Now that being said, Adobe has plenty of non-standardized file formats that they absolutely could do AutoCAD-style shenanigans with.
Yeah, that's not going to happen.
The backlash against Adobe would be intense from users and the industry for attempting to break JPEG's interoperability as an ISO standard.
Let’s not get carried away here; Adobe has competed against hundreds of image editors ever since Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 and haven’t messed with the interoperability of their file formats.
Just to be clear, nobody at Adobe is losing sleep over a suite of free apps that are knock-offs of Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, etc. for now.
As seen on the main Artcraft repo. There's other tools that are MIT-licensed, although given that people are noting that this is AI-created the notion of copyright on this is suspect to begin with. Remember kids: all AI slop is born public domain because machines don't have a soul for the purpose of copyright law. And probably also the 13th amendment. Don't upload your brain, kids.
Anyway, let me get up on my soapbox and talk about these "have your cake and eat it too" licenses, that try to be source-available while privileging one particular vendor as the Blessed Owner with special monetization powers. To put it shortly, this doesn't work, because it mixes all the bad parts of FOSS with all the bad parts of proprietary software.
The business model of proprietary software does not work with even source-available terms. Proprietary software is a game of becoming essential to your customers and then taking them for everything they've got. All the successful proprietary companies are, effectively, selling legacy software that was useful to a group of companies a long time ago, but is now so deeply integrated into their IT systems they don't even know they have it until the licensing police show up. "You can use it for free but can't sell it" is anathema to this: it is specifically the "use" part that you're worried about.
Likewise, being able to modify the software - even only for internal uses - means that the proprietary owner has to compete against their own customers for ongoing payments and revenue. Again, if you've dug your talons into a big org to the point where you're indispensable, you don't want your customers making their own forks of your code. You want them paying $$$$/mo for enterprise support.
What FOSS is doing is basically promising to never do these things. If your goal is to make money, then adopting FOSS is like a cat going vegan. And the half-measure source-available licenses don't help, because you wind up conceding all the things that make you money just so you can claim ownership over things most people weren't interested in.
also, from their CLAUDE.md:
> Clean-room. Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the Illustrator bundle (names/listings only). Never copy Adobe icons, artwork, presets or wording beyond feature names. Behaviour comes from public docs and black-box observation of the running app with synthetic documents only (screenshots by window id, stored under plan/illustrator/screenshots/, never committed). Never copy GPL/AGPL code (Inkscape, lib2geom…).
There is no such thing as clean-room vibe coding. Every line of FOSS code has been trained on. If you use any AI coding model, you are generating code that is going to be similar to copylefted code. There is no "MIT/Apache only" model out there you can use.
Also, no, switching to GPL doesn't help. Actually, it is my opinion that you cannot meaningfully comply with GPL while vibe-coding, because you have changed the definition of "corresponding source code" from a bunch of .rs files to a number of prompts being handed off to a cloud model. Remember: according to GPL, the source code is not "the thing you put into the compiler", it's "the thing the developers prefer to edit to alter the program". Otherwise, you could say "the source code is this uncommented ASM listing" and sidestep the GPL entirely. What we're doing with AI is the same idea, except instead of going down one level of abstraction, we're going up one.
At inference time, there's a whole new legal question: are the specific outputs of the model substantially similar to anything that the LLM had access to? Even if AI training itself was infringement, a specific generated output of that model could be noninfringing anyway. And vice versa, AI training being fair use doesn't form a blanket defense against a specific AI copyright infringement. If you ask the model to create an art program, it could still generate something substantially similar to the code of an existing art program.
In the case of regurgitation[0], the fact that an LLM was involved is immaterial. The only thing the law cares about is if a copy was made somewhere along the chain and if the alleged copy was substantially similar to the purported original. The only thing LLMs do for this analysis is make access to the original far easier to allege, because LLMs are trained on everything.
[0] Inclusive of both model weights and context regurgitation
If this is about the desktop apps and not the website, I'd love it if you could file an issue. We're going to work through everything.
Nobody is beating Adobe with "claude create for me a clone of the adobe suite". Someone that knows what they are doing need to be behind it. It might be you but it would take years of experience if you don't have them yet.
They're not trying to "beat Adobe" and they certainly didn't wake up one day and tell Claude to make the entire Adobe suite of products.
However, in the not-too-distant future, it'll be the norm to pay $0 for apps and buy AI tokens when needed. That's what Canva did with Affinity--you pay $0 for Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher that are just as good and in some cases better than Adobe's apps.
Access to advanced features and AI requires a subscription.
These are still super early alpha. All MIT/Apache licensed. No telemetry.
I'm going to try to drive these to 100% parity but it's going to take a minute. And I'll need lots of help. (Anyone want to join me? I'll pay stipends and bug bounties.)
I'm going to do Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and Solidworks too. Probably a lot of stuff to collapse.
It's not just SaaSocalypse. Everything can be open source multiplatform Rust now.
Party like it's 1999 and the Internet / tech scene belongs to us again. We can literally deenshittify the world without breaking a sweat.
Disagree.
There's a difference between "vibe coding" and incorporating AI into a software development process. Hobbyists vibe code for shits and giggles on the weekends.
These guys incorporated dozens of pre-existing Rust packages into their codebases, made sure the apps ran on macOS, Windows and Linux and in modern web browsers. That’s not vibe coding.
Did they use coding agents to assist them? Of course! No different than teams at Microsoft, Google, Adobe, etc. Re-creating Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, InDesign, etc. from scratch in Rust is a huge undertaking; one that would have been impossible just a couple of years ago.
I'm sick of Gimp, Krita, and Inkscape being the best Linux and open source have to offer.
I think you can do this project of yours without being dismissive of the work (and the merits of the work) done by real people over years.
Be careful of what you might damage by doing this.
Specially when the LLMs he is using to make this software were 100% trained and likely heavily influenced by the software he is shitting on.
"Shitting on the shoulder of giants"
Affinity works both similarly and differently and is now pretty popular.
It’s different but really not inferior to Photoshop, for example (better live filters, cross model curves, better layer blending), and it’s not inferior to InDesign or Illustrator, mostly. It does have a file format that allows all three to coexist (in fact it effectively always did).
They all have sufficient familiarity (the basics of the tools and layers are now pretty much a standard “medium” that most photo/painting apps implement, after all) but they have their own advantages. The integration between the three apps is way ahead.
I just don’t see why anyone would make open source apps that don’t move things forward (Krita and Inkscape do, in their own ways).
It’s also a pretty hollow demonstration of AI, ultimately, to use it to just clone ripoffs, but it does have a sort of fractal self-similarity I suppose.
I don’t think anyone is served well by pursuing blatant cloning in open source. But if this is the shoddy destiny of AI coding then I am at peace with it. People can use lazy knockoffs if they want.
I've used nearly every open source creative tool that open source has to offer, and I've been deeply unsatisfied by what's available.
I've repeatedly tried to get into Krita over the years and it's just not my cup of tea. It's fine if it works for you, but I'm not happy with it.
I don't like Kdenlive either. Or much of anything from or built with KDE or Gnome.
But its a lot harder if you want to maintain at least some level of quality. For example, your PDF export exports texts as paths and correct PDF encoding and font subsetting took months of trial and error (I maintain the printpdf crate).
So you have to actually use your apps, test extensively, etc. - don‘t underestimate the effort required for QA and testing.
Don't let that discourage you, though! A fast, local, fully-featured 3D parametric CAD program that takes advantage of modern hardware parallelism that can be extended/scripted is just basically one of the holy grails of software and even exploratory efforts might uncover some great paths forward to making that a reality!
With photoshop, illustrator, etc., there’s a fair amount of code out there. No LLM has however ever seen the source code —- or I suspect even much detailed discussion —- of a bRep kernel better than Opencascade, but with the right people to decide what maths to work on, maybe there is progress to be made. This knowledge is held by few people, many of whom will now have retired!
A big of the attraction of re-building this kind of foundational software isn't the base capability (commercial 3D CAD has barely even seen incremental improvements for more than a decade, in large part because it's just pretty well solved in the existing programs), but that a modern kernel would be a major step forward for unblocking implementation of some of those other capabilities.
There’s plenty of work that’s not appropriate for, but works for me.
I look forward to the beta and beyond!
You may want those in new high-performance infinite precision: https://github.com/timschmidt/hyperreal
Exact curves: https://github.com/timschmidt/hypercurve
Meshes: https://github.com/timschmidt/hypermesh
and more in the ~22 crate stack.
I'll be pinging you about this in the future
we remember different 1999s. i remember everyone pirating software made by large companies at that moment in time
Someone will make up new laws just to get rid of that specifically and that will likely even work, if one guy is behind _all_ the recreations.
Maybe you could somehow distribute that, so that it's at least a game of whack-a-mole for the defender.
__
This btw is made orders of magnitude worse by the fact that you are trying to make money off those recreations, and you're doing so right now.
So the whole "I was just a foss & rust absolutist" defense doesn't count.
So.. eh. Idk man. Icarus with a claude jetpack I guess.
___
Also, keep in mind the sums of money that are involved in what you're attacking there.
Those are software companies with leverage of a small country. They can also simply just disappear you if you fuck with them too much. Which is not hyperbole.
That's so much money, it bends the rules of reality you think you have outsmarted.
If it's not "them" as an entity, it will be "that one manager that is scared of their personal bonus" that will personally go through any means necessary to make it stop.
Remember the ebay stalking scandal?
Remember the Boeing whistleblower?
These are not monetized in any way. They don't have telemetry, paywalls, or anything.
If you're looking at the other software we've built, that's a source available (soon to be open source) Higgsfield and OpenRouter/FAL.
Yes, I know what you're going to say that it's technically something different, but, really, man.
The people you're messing with cannot simply be outsmarted on technicalities in the way a "HN contrarian" (as per your bio) would win a debate on this platform.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1wwnhbt/ive_created_o...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1wxmunv/ive_created...
https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1wwo52q/ive_creat...
https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1wvz0lj/100_open_so...
https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1wvz4ua/100_ope...
> We have estimates for feature parity checked into the roadmap files of each app. We should be in "Beta" stage / ~100% parity within a month.
> We're going to reach 100% parity within a month.
Can't wait to check back in a month!
Personally, I switched to open-source alternatives way back in the late 1900s, and they've only continued to improve ever since. Adobe has been lagging behind for over a quarter of a century, in the ways which matter to me, and they keep getting farther behind as they turn to worse and worse methods of extorting money from people.
YMMV, of course.
I can get behind almost anything which reduces lock-in for Adobe's remaining customers, but from what I see in other comments, this probably ain't it. It seems very vibey and buggy. But maybe after more work is put in, it could be good. It looks like it wasn't supposed to go public yet, and they're aware that it's not ready yet.
(Disclosure: I'm the developer)
Over the years I have tried Capture One — it's fine, I dunno, I just didn't settle with it, even though I shoot a lot of portraits which is its comfort zone. (I actually started out with it, free thing from SanDisk)
I really like DxO Photolab but I know this app enrages lots of people; I particularly like the tone curve handling, FilmPack integration, etc.
Lately I have been learning ART, the RawTherapee fork, and I have to say that despite its very idiosyncratic interface, I like this quite a lot.
I’ve tried getting rid of creative suite for years, but when it comes down to it no competitor has actually come close.
I see the same argument all the time about Windows vs Linux. Linux lacks this, Linux lacks that, etc... but somehow, people fail to notice that Windows lacks a whole lot of important things that Linux has. Because a Windows user won't be aware of what they're missing. But for me, coming from a Linux background, Windows is missing so much I would view it as unusable.
Changing from one to the other is painful, because of the differences. It's not a drop-in replacement you can keep using exactly the same way. But that doesn't make either one better or worse. They're different, and that's a good thing. But different requires learning, and learning is hard.
Anyway, you're correct that $FreeProgram isn't a drop-in replacement for $ProprietaryProgram. But that's not a valid argument on the relative value of the two programs.
But I’m not trying to convince anyone here, just saying it makes sense people are paying for Adobe software.
Network effects like presets and plugin ecosystem, tutorials and books, team knowledge (you can ask a colleague how to do things).
Switching costs like lightroom catalogues, learning new programs, if it works why fixit.
And the price is not that high if your company pays for it. Open stuff would have to be much better and Adobe much more buggy before most people consider switching.
It's a bit like saying you never hear complaints from piano players, only dentists. But dentists also play piano, just like everyone else. Dentists just know more about teeth than the average pianist.
There are people who live inside photoshop the way developers live inside VSC or Zed or emacs.
Some of those photographers then use their new baseline familiarity with Capture One to test out Affinity for further edits.
But you're just never going to have the time to burn your bridges with the platform in one go. I don't think that is very different from the way developers work; in practice nobody with any serious obligations can simply switch language and toolchain in one go.
So there is attrition, but there is never going to be a threshold over which people cross and get a widespread revolt. I'm not even sure that happened with the switch to Creative Cloud, because they padded that transition by making it easier on photographers and with the other single app plan (that I think no longer exists?)
My own feeling is that there are serious cracks in the way Photoshop works. For example the "smart objects" bodge when they could do what Affinity Photo does with live filter layers, not to mention (when comparing with Affinity) Photoshop's weaker layer blend controls, lack of cross-model curves, lack of a frequency separation tool, culture of over-reliance on plugins.
But Photoshop has things Affinity does not, yet — a mature DAM/Bridge integration, some of the more advanced warp tools, etc., and tiny details like better perlin noise generation.
So it's like the situation with Word, isn't it — 95% of people use only a tiny fraction of what Word can do, but they don't all use the same tiny fraction.
People have their reasons to switch or not switch; even among hobbyist photographers who complain about the cost of everything else, the price of the photography plan does not seem to be one of them (thanks in part to Adobe's strategic reliance on Amazon Prime Day/Deal Days bundles)
I used to be much more aggressively anti-Adobe than I am now. I am never going to use Creative Cloud again myself, mind you, because I do not need anything it uniquely does anymore.
I'm not sure if it really makes sense to copy the UI and visual language of the source that verbatim (and I believe that Adobe will rightfully retaliate on specifically that), but for the time being, that's neat.
I bet the industry didn't expect that their IP laundering tools would eventually launder their own IP.
Can't believe HN sentiment is taking adobe's side over open source, just because the latter used AI.
It is - effectively - exactly the same in spirit as Adobe. It's just business people fighting each other.
Which is nice don't get me wrong, but it's a different kind of nice.
Phrased differently and more inflammatory, the F in Foss does not mean fraud and hopefully never will. This however is just that. Defrauding someone out of their unjustified monopoly through GPU compute instead of merit.
Look at it. It is an identical recreation created in bad faith with zero additional creativity put into it.
It is "I want this, but I don't like that it is yours. I will take it. Claude, clone these apps in rust. Make no mistakes."
___
Just because Adobe sucks doesn't mean that someone capable of doing that and doing it this blatantly would be trustworthy and "on our side".
In fact, given all what I've seen, I'd predict that this guy in particular will just rugpull people even harder than adobe could ever do, given that they have the inertia and friction of being a large corp softening and slowing down the blows they could deal.
As said, it's still fine because Adobe is a terrible corp, but don't be mistaken. And do not taint foss with this.
> Software is over. But for real. I just one-shotted Photoshop. The whole thing.
You're telling me it's not the entirety of photoshop?
99% parity will take a while, but I'm sure it'll be measured in months and not years.
Feel free to check in on this claim. It's measurable.
and now it's not ready for HN? what happened in the last 24 hours for that to be the case?
i look forward to a beta release of all 7 softwares with 99% feature parity november 5th.
I needed to seed a community that could help contribute bug reports and PRs.
I had no intention of posting a thread here until it was more mature, because I knew this would be the response.
The haters aren't seeing the direction, and proven examples.
Bun was a conversion of the source code to a different language.
Holy shit dude you cannot possibly just say out loud that you're using people.
I know that AI makes you feel like god, but this is the style of communication that will be quoted against you. If you truly want to play this game (which I _highly_ recommend you shouldn't) then you must absolutely step that up.
seems completely normal to release free beta software and ask for feedback.
There are some incredibly smart people on HN, but I wasn't quite ready for this project to face the firing squad. It's still much too new for the world's harshest critics.
With lots of additional effort, I expect this to succeed much like bun. Fingers crossed.
Obviously you don't need to pay for Photoshop anymore. Does that mean your product is the replacement? No. Just an example.
The fact that you or anyone can get to 95-99% very quickly. The rest can be added over time at a very high pace and some "actual effort".
Unless Photoshop can add some sort of proprietary features then why use them? (they have been doing this with AI features mostly, but it should still all be copyable)
fact? what fact? have people lost their fucking minds here?
And then four days ago:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922904
And you've mentioned ArtCraft numerous times https://hn.algolia.com/?q=by%3Aechelon+artcraft
Obviously you've been trying to get traction on this for a while. You can't claim that you "one-shotted photoshop" and then drop links and act surprised when someone decides to test that claim.
Calm down and be patient. Let the community token spend have time to diffuse into the products.
This effort needs a community to climb the quality and parity gradients. But I'm not ready to really show it off until we've hit some thresholds.
I've got the attention I needed to bootstrap this, so I can go back to work.
But look on the bright side, this is a chance to prove all of the haters wrong. Given your enthusiasm about AI and its capabilities it shouldn't be an issue.
I think it might be possible to slop-code an Excel clone because — truly minor interactivity quibbles aside — it can be tested with a truly exhaustive suite. The clone can be proved to do what it is supposed to do, over whatever subset one would choose to implement.
But Photoshop is not an application in the same way that Excel is an application.
(Not least because while powerful, Excel, like Word, is an implementation of an existing idea. Photoshop is the OG; it has all the history of the OG)
Photoshop is also a surface and a medium. It has a feel, it has responsiveness. It's like oil painting or watercolour: its own thing, with its own pen/brush dynamics, its own interactivity.
Part of the reason people don't want to switch away to Affinity (even though Affinity is free as in beer, highly capable and in some ways better) is just that to a set of very hardcore users, it does not have this feel. They just don't like how it feels.
Automated testing that focusses on pixel-precise rendering misses the point. It may actually matter less that it renders PSDs pixel-accurately than that it actually feels right.
If you are not convinced by my argument, look at "dodge and burn retouching". For better or worse, high end fashion photo retouching is done in an extremely precise, wildly technical, tiny subset of Photoshop tools.
If you want to replace Photoshop it has to be responsive at that level. And since that level is partly subjective experience, it's going to take some people.
You really need to sit down with a Photoshop user to see how they feel about it and how they approach alternatives; it took me no time to adapt from Photoshop + Wacom tablet to Affinity Photo + Wacom tablet, but I know photographers who won't because it's "not right".
Serif had more luck converting Illustrator users to Affinity Designer, and made the right decision to release Designer first, because Illustrator users were much more frustrated with Adobe, and because giving those users what they wanted helped get past the way the app does not "feel" exactly the same.
There is no way that a "pixel-accurate compliance" test suite can capture what it is that makes these applications the way they are.
its a little impressive that models have a compressed approximation of photoshop inside that works with minimal tinkering.
the icon for windows doesnt work.