PhotoCraft vs Photoshop: What the Free Rust Alternative Can Do Today
An honest, feature-by-feature comparison of PhotoCraft and Adobe Photoshop: PSD support, layers, adjustment layers, layer styles, selections, filters, AI features, price and platforms.
Published October 13, 2026 · Unofficial community guide
PhotoCraft is the headline app of the ArtCraft Crafting Apps: an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop, written in pure Rust. It’s the reason “artcraft photoshop” and “photocraft photoshop” are trending searches. So how close is it really?
Short answer: closer than you’d expect from a project this young, but not a full replacement yet. Here’s the detail.
At a glance
| PhotoCraft 0.8 | Adobe Photoshop | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, MIT OR Apache-2.0 | Subscription |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, browser | Windows, macOS, iPad, web (limited) |
| Account required | No | Yes |
| PSD | Open, edit, save | Native |
| Adjustment layers | 16, plus direct pixel adjustments | Full set |
| Layer styles | All 10 classic effects | All |
| Smart objects / smart filters | Yes | Yes |
| Generative AI (Generative Fill etc.) | No | Yes |
| Third-party plug-ins (8bf/UXP) | No | Yes |
| Scripting | CLI, JSON control channel, MCP server | UXP, ExtendScript |
| Maturity | Early alpha | Mature |
PSD support: the big surprise
PhotoCraft opens, edits and saves layered PSD files, which is where most Photoshop alternatives fall down. Its test suite re-saves 307 of the 309 files in the public psd-tools corpus with a matching render. Type layers round-trip as editable text, shape layers match Photoshop’s pixels (116 of 116 in their corpus), and layer styles and patterns come through from the file.
If your main need is “open a client’s PSD on Linux and tweak a text layer”, PhotoCraft already does it.
Layers, masks and adjustment layers
You get groups, clipping masks, pixel and vector masks, fill layers, 27 Photoshop blend modes (plus six Paint.NET variants), and adjustment layers including Curves, Levels with a live histogram, Hue/Saturation, Vibrance, Black & White, Channel Mixer, Gradient Map, Photo Filter, Selective Color and Color Lookup (.cube/.3dl/.look LUTs).
Documents can be RGB, Grayscale, CMYK or Lab at 8, 16 or 32 bits per channel. There’s real ICC color management, soft proofing and gamut warning, which is rare even in commercial alternatives.
Selections
Marquees, lassos, Magnetic Lasso and Magic Wand are all there, plus Quick Selection, Object Selection and Select Subject, and Select and Mask for hair. Smart selection runs locally. Nothing is uploaded.
Brushes, retouching and filters
A real brush engine with Shape Dynamics, Scattering, Texture, Dual Brush, pressure and tilt; the Spot Healing Brush, Healing Brush, Patch and Content-Aware tools; 67 tools in total. Filters include the full Blur Gallery (Tilt-Shift, Iris, Field, Spin, Path), Reduce Noise, distortions, Oil Paint, Lens Flare and Lighting Effects. Filters preview live on the canvas and can be applied as editable smart filters.
Where Photoshop still wins
Upstream is candid about the gaps:
- No generative AI. No Generative Fill, Generative Expand or Neural Filters inside PhotoCraft. Community bridges to ComfyUI exist, and the separate ArtCraft studio covers AI generation.
- Missing tools. About 15 Photoshop tools aren’t implemented yet.
- Typography depth, pro workflows and plug-ins: less depth than Photoshop here, and no compatibility with Photoshop plug-ins.
- Polish and speed on huge files. It’s an early alpha that ships new versions every few days.
The maintainers sum it up: PhotoCraft “is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work.”
Who should use PhotoCraft today?
- Linux users who need real PSD editing without Wine.
- Students and hobbyists who know Photoshop’s shortcuts and don’t want a subscription.
- Developers and AI-agent builders. Every action is a command, so you can batch-edit PSDs from the CLI or let Claude drive it over MCP.
- Anyone on a locked-down machine. PhotoCraft runs in the browser with nothing to install.
If you rely on Generative Fill or third-party plug-ins every day, keep Photoshop for now and check back in a few months.
How to try it
- Online: Open PhotoCraft. Drop in a PSD and see how it renders.
- Download: official installers for Windows, macOS and Linux.
- Compare the rest of the suite: ArtCraft vs Adobe Creative Cloud.