ArtCraft: Seven Free Rebuilds of Adobe's Suite, and What Each One Can Do

TL;DR: ArtCraft is a family of seven free, open-source apps that rebuild Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects and InDesign from scratch in Rust. Each runs natively on Windows, macOS and Linux (and in a browser tab through WebAssembly), each is licensed MIT or Apache-2.0, none asks for an account, and together they pulled in 57,000 GitHub stars and more than 360,000 downloads of their current releases in about a fortnight. They are also all in alpha, and each app's own roadmap puts real parity with Adobe well short of finished. PhotoCraft, the Photoshop rebuild, is the closest to usable and the obvious place to start.

Adobe's subscription model is expensive and, as of this year, legally awkward. Photoshop alone is US$22.99 a month, Creative Cloud Pro is US$69.99 a month, and in March 2026 Adobe agreed to a $150 million settlement with the US Department of Justice over how it hid early termination fees and made cancelling harder than signing up. ArtCraft is the most serious attempt yet at making that whole conversation optional.

It arrived with a bang two weeks ago: seven repositories, seven apps, one weekend of attention, and a wave of coverage about a model writing Rust under supervision. The coverage got the launch. What it mostly missed was the part that matters for anyone deciding whether to install it: each app publishes its own honest scoreboard, and those numbers are a lot more useful than the headlines.

What ArtCraft Is

Seven applications, each aimed at one Adobe product:

• PhotoCraft rebuilds Photoshop.
• VectorCraft rebuilds Illustrator.
• FilmCraft rebuilds Premiere Pro.
• LightCraft rebuilds Lightroom (the cloud-shaped one, not Lightroom Classic).
• PdfCraft rebuilds Acrobat.
• EffectCraft rebuilds After Effects.
• DesignCraft rebuilds InDesign.

An eighth, GridCraft, is an open-source spreadsheet aimed at Excel. Its repository exists and is picking up stars, but the app is not on the download page yet, so treat it as next rather than now.

The team calls all of them clean-room reimplementations, which is the load-bearing phrase. Clean room means the behaviour was built from public specifications, published file formats and observed results rather than by decompiling Adobe's binaries. It is why they can ship at all, and it is why the apps mirror Adobe's menus, shortcuts and panel layouts without copying Adobe's code.

Two engineering decisions shape everything else. The first is Rust, compiled to real desktop binaries: no Electron, no Chromium, no web view pretending to be an app. VectorCraft renders 20,000 shapes in about 27 milliseconds at full retina resolution while the interface stays at 120 frames a second, and it does that with SIMD rendering on a thread separate from the UI. FilmCraft's video decoders are bit-exact against ffmpeg as an external oracle, and the H.264 decoder runs 500 to 600 frames a second at 1080p.

The second is that every action in every one of these apps is a named command in a single registry. PhotoCraft alone wires more than 500 of them. The button you click, the script you run and the AI agent you point at the app all call the same commands.

The Seven, One by One

PhotoCraft, the Photoshop Rebuild

The most mature of the family and the one to try first. Layers, groups, clipping masks, pixel and vector masks, fill layers and alpha channels. Sixteen adjustment layers with live previews, including Curves with per-channel control and Levels with a live histogram. The full set of layer styles on any layer, type included, and 70-plus live-preview filters with the Blur Gallery among them. Documents at 8, 16 and 32-bit in RGB, CMYK, Lab and Grayscale, with ICC colour management and soft proofing.

Its file handling is the part worth understanding properly. Opening and re-saving renders the same for 307 of the 309 files in the psd-tools test set, and a separate standalone PSD crate in the repo reproduces 134 of 135 real-world files byte for byte. Saving from the app, though, rewrites the document: image resources, layer records and the composite are regenerated, so a re-saved file is not byte-identical to the original even when it looks the same. Keep your originals, and compare one side by side before you trust the round trip.

Every one of Photoshop's 627 menu items is wired to a command. That is a measure of wiring, not of behaving, and the project says so in the same sentence.

VectorCraft, the Illustrator Rebuild

The second most finished, and the one with the most surprising extra. Alongside the Pen, Direct Selection, Pathfinder, Shape Builder, Appearance and Swatches panels you would expect, it opens Affinity documents natively: .af, .afdesign, .afpub and, by their content, .afphoto files come in with layers, artboards, curves, fills, gradients, clipping and text intact. Anything that did not survive the import is listed in a warning, and a file whose native data cannot be read opens as its embedded preview with the reason stated. It does not write Affinity files back.

Exports cover SVG, PDF and PDF-compatible .ai with PDF/X, EPS, DXF, EMF, WMF and raster formats, plus Export for Screens. Everyday vector illustration is described as close to usable, with vector booleans exact rather than failing on curves the way older tools did.

FilmCraft, the Premiere Pro Rebuild

A familiar timeline with source and program monitors, bins, patch and target buttons, sync locks and linked selection, and the Editing, Assembly, Color, Effects and Audio workspaces, plus three-point editing, every trim type and a full keyframe and effects stack.

The codec work under it is the real story. There is no ffmpeg inside. H.264, HEVC, ProRes, VP9, AV1, AAC and Opus are the team's own Rust implementations, written from the public ITU-T, ISO and IETF specifications and tested frame by frame against ffmpeg. H.264 is bit-exact on 37-plus streams and encodes in High, Main and Baseline profiles with CABAC, B-frames and two-pass rate control.

The catch is delivery. H.264 is the only format it exports, so there is no HEVC or AV1 output yet, and it hosts no VST3, Audio Units or OpenFX plug-ins.

LightCraft, the Lightroom Rebuild

A library and a raw developer in one native app, not a cloud client. Albums nested in folders, ratings, flags, colour labels and a search that understands fields like rating:>3 iso:>800 camera:x2. Every adjustment is non-destructive and renders through a scene-referred, 32-bit float pipeline, with tone and colour work computed in OkLCh, a modern perceptual colour space. Vibrance protects skin tones, and an eight-band colour mixer with three-way grading wheels does the rest.

The honest limit is camera colour. Sony, Nikon, Panasonic, Fujifilm and Canon CR3 files get guarded estimates derived from their camera JPEGs, with measured profiles only for a handful of bodies, and other raws fall back to a neutral matrix. Subject and sky selection are classical heuristics rather than trained models.

PdfCraft, the Acrobat Rebuild

A viewer and workbench for pages: organizing, combining, splitting, comment threads, form filling and authoring with sandboxed JavaScript, password handling, redaction, sanitizing, basic digital signatures, printing and an accessibility checker. Typography gets real attention, including right-to-left and complex scripts, vertical CJK, colour emoji, soft masks and blend modes.

Its save behaviour is the nicest surprise in the suite: writes append your changes atomically and leave the original bytes untouched, so a mistaken close costs you nothing. Pages are currently drawn by a third-party Rust crate while the team builds its own renderer. Editing text that already exists in a PDF is the weak spot, especially in CJK, and there is no OCR beyond Latin script, no Office import or export, and no signature timestamps or long-term validation.

EffectCraft, the After Effects Rebuild

The youngest app in the family, with a first commit on 1 October 2026, and already carrying 306 effects, compositions, layers, keyframes, layer styles, expressions, 3D cameras and lights, and a render queue. Two things it does that After Effects does not: Lottie import and export are built in, so animation can go straight to the web and to apps without a plug-in, and project files are versioned, human-readable JSON that diffs cleanly in version control.

The hard limits: it cannot open .aep or .aepx projects and no After Effects plug-in runs inside it, so this is a place to build new work rather than to open old work. Roto Brush and face tracking lean on small optional model downloads (MobileSAM at about 40 MB, MediaPipe Face Landmarker at about 3.8 MB), and neither has been compared against Adobe's yet.

DesignCraft, the InDesign Rebuild

Page layout with the parts that make InDesign InDesign: spreads and parent pages, frames and threaded stories, a Control panel, paragraph and character styles, swatches, text wrap, baseline grid and optical margin alignment. The typography engine uses a Knuth-Plass paragraph composer with dictionary hyphenation, and line breaks come out identical on screen and in exported PDF.

It imports and exports IDML, which is the practical bridge for anyone with existing InDesign work, and exports PNG. PDF export is on the roadmap rather than in the build.

How They Compare

Prices are Adobe's own, checked on 9 October 2026. Parity figures are each app's own published estimate, which is worth more than any review number.

Creative Cloud Pro at $69.99 a month is the plan that covers all seven Adobe products at once, which is the fairer comparison if you use more than one. Against that, the ArtCraft apps cost nothing and cover the same ground, unfinished.

Scripts, Agents and Your Files

This is where the suite separates itself from every free alternative that came before it, and it is easy to miss in a launch video.

Each app ships a headless command-line tool, a loopback-only JSON control channel for driving a running window, and an MCP server, so an AI agent can do anything a person can: draw, edit, export, or run a batch across a folder. PhotoCraft's command line takes an action list and applies it to a directory of images in one pass.

# Headless: open, edit, export
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

# One action list across a folder of images
photocraft-cli batch --actions grade.json --in ./raw --out ./graded

# Let an agent drive it over MCP
photocraft-cli mcp

Project files are open formats too. PhotoCraft uses .pcraft, EffectCraft uses .ecproj, VectorCraft and DesignCraft both use documented JSON. Adobe's counterparts are closed binaries, which is the difference between a tool you use and a tool you can build on.

Everything runs locally. There is no account, no telemetry and no licence server, and because the core is Rust compiled to WebAssembly, six of the seven also run in a browser tab if you want to try before installing.

Where the Suite Falls Short

The gaps are consistent across all seven, and each project documents most of them itself.

• No generative AI. There is no Generative Fill, no prompt-based editing, no text-to-image inside any of the seven. Adobe has spent three years pushing Firefly into the middle of its workflow, and ArtCraft has not started. The separate ArtCraft studio app does AI image and video generation, but it is a different product on a different licence.
• No plug-ins anywhere. Photoshop's plug-in ecosystem, Premiere's OpenFX and VST3 hosting, InDesign's scripted extensions. None of it runs here. For a working studio, that is often the real switching cost, more than any missing menu item.
• Everything is weeks old. PhotoCraft was first public in October. EffectCraft's first commit was 1 October. PhotoCraft's own roadmap records that first public use found a text selection offset, 214 broken shortcuts, panels that resized themselves and an immovable crop frame, all in features their tests called live. Expect that class of bug across the family.
• The parity numbers flatter by counting. PhotoCraft wires 627 of 627 menu items to commands, which is a wiring count, and its own honest assessment puts real parity far lower. Read the second number in every app, not the first.
• Interchange with Adobe is one-way in places. PSD files save back with a rewritten structure, After Effects projects cannot be opened at all, and Affinity files import but do not export.
• No cloud, no collaboration, no mobile. These are single-machine desktop apps. There is no shared library, no review link, no iPad build, no team comment thread.
• A young project with a small core. PhotoCraft has 121 contributors on GitHub, but the commit graph is dominated by a handful of accounts and the company is about a year old. Adobe is not going to be displaced by a project this age, whatever the download numbers say.

Getting Started

Start with PhotoCraft, since it is the most finished. Download the installer from the PhotoCraft page, then work down the full app list if you want the others. Every app ships as a Windows MSI or portable zip, a universal macOS disk image, and Linux AppImage, Flatpak, deb, rpm or tarball, with a host-yourself web build and published SHA-256 checksums.

If you would rather build one, PhotoCraft needs Rust 1.90 or newer:

git clone https://github.com/storytold/photocraft.git
cd photocraft
cargo run --release -p photocraft

Two things to do before you rely on any of them. Open a copy of a file you care about and compare the round trip against Adobe before trusting it, and read the parity page in each repository for the specific features you personally use. Every project publishes one.

Who Is Behind It

Brandon Thomas founded ArtCraft about a year ago, having previously run Storyteller.ai and worked as an engineer at Square. He is blunt about the motive in interviews: Adobe charged him its cancellation fee more than once, and he decided to rebuild the tools. He also pushes back on the vibe-coding framing, describing himself as a fifteen-year veteran who has used Rust for about a decade and has built large-scale Rust systems before.

The contributors are not one person. PhotoCraft's list runs past 120 accounts including anonymous ones, and an account named claude sits ninth by commit count with 13 commits, alongside named developers working on Linux display servers, the brush engine, the colour pipeline and the test scorecards.

The Bottom Line

ArtCraft is the most interesting thing to happen to free creative software this year, and it is seven alpha apps rather than a finished suite. PhotoCraft and VectorCraft are close enough to use for real work on the right job. FilmCraft, LightCraft and PdfCraft cover a lot of ground with clear, documented holes. EffectCraft and DesignCraft are early enough that you would be trying them rather than switching to them.

What makes the family worth watching is not the launch week, and it is not the AI angle. It is that the source is open, the files are open, the licences are permissive, and every button is a command an agent can call. Those are the properties that let a project this young get better quickly, and they are exactly the properties Adobe's software has never had.

Try PhotoCraft for the jobs where you would otherwise open Photoshop for ten minutes, and keep your current editor installed. You can see where it sits against the rest of the field in our free Photoshop alternatives category, and the short version of PhotoCraft is catalogued in our directory.

Looking for other free creative tools? Check out our coverage of Upscayl for AI upscaling, RMBG-2 on Pinokio for background removal, and our roundup of free alternatives to popular paid subscriptions.

Reviewed 9 October 2026. Star counts, download counts, versions and prices were read the same day from Adobe's plans page, the seven project repositories, each project's own roadmap and parity files, and the vendor's release listings. The settlement figure comes from the Department of Justice press release of March 2026.