https://github.com/storytold/photocraft (Photoshop)

https://github.com/storytold/vectorcraft (Illustrator)

https://github.com/storytold/filmcraft (Premiere)

https://github.com/storytold/lightcraft (Lightroom)

https://github.com/storytold/printcraft (Acrobat Pro)

https://github.com/storytold/effectcraft (After Effects)

https://github.com/storytold/designcraft (InDesign)

Interesting but for photography at least, there's a massive hole: RAW support. What they've implemented is very limited and basic, nothing like parity with Lightroom or Photoshop. Just try loading a RAW photo into Lightroom/Photoshop and put the window next to Lightcraft/Photocraft - the results are completely different and not in a good way. Lightcraft's image looks like an amateur attempt at RAW processing from first principles, without any of the most basic colour profiles and adjustments that Lightroom applies. Photocraft doesn't even offer RAW processing, it just dumps the raster straight in.

I'd treat this as completely new, far from complete software heavily inspired by the Adobe Suite, rather than a "port".

But maybe folks who use workflows that don't involve RAW photos have better luck.

I find it awfully funny that your response to someone creating the entire Adobe software suite in a day is “the colours aren’t rich enough for my liking”

Oh the times we live in.

I also built one of these photoshop clones. It has raw support. I use it for Fuji raw editing. I've been building it with Claude for 6 months now.

https://lopsy.art

How many painting applications have been built by LLMs I wonder?

I also let it build one btw: https://egeozcan.github.io/ketchup/ (not a PS clone, more amateur painting oriented)

>amateur attempt at RAW processing from first principles

That tracks.

So it's the Omarchy of Adobe-like software?

Raw was a tough one when I tried it a few months ago -- I never thought about how individual color pixels on the sensor come together to form a color value for a point in an image file. Super interesting, and not at all standard between the different manufacturers. It's a hard problem for software to solve in a general way.

RAW is where these things fall over. Every new camera body needs its own color matrices and profiles, forever. Day-one demo is easy. Wait till someone's new body ships and their files come out green, then see who's on call.

In two of its test cases, it changes the PSD on save so much that an export render differs. No RAW support. No folder sync or plugins. Limited brush support. It’s like the author never actually used their vibe-coded output and just decided it looked good enough.

this sounds exactly what I'd expect from v0.3.0 of a software.

a lot of rough edges of this program I see are actually features I never even used myself in photoshop-like program that much, so if I was doing that kind of AI rewrite I'd also miss polishing them. publicly releasing this right now is exactly the move author needs to get human feedback from people who actually use these features daily

I was able to use Photocraft and Claude to do something that the plain generative image AI in ChatGPT couldn't. I had two photos of the same location, one with 3 people, one with 1 person. I took the photos with the people strategically standing where the photos could be easily be combined without the people interfering with one another. A month ago, I tried using ChatGPT to combine the people into one photo. Its attempts never looked right. It always changed the faces of everyone. Today, I tried using Claude and this Photocraft MCP server to do this. After 3 quick tries over 5 minutes, it did it. The 2 additional tries were to have it fix some lighting differences. Thanks to the person who created this!

Yes, I could have definitely done it myself, but that's besides the point. It wasn't important/urgent enough for me to spend 20-30 minutes to do it (yet). But I was curious enough to play with this to have it done this way.

Post AI - What is the future of making money with software? Desktop apps or SaaS? This certainly also would cut into the bottom line of software companies so they won't exist and then these companies are supposed to be the prime customers of the AI companies.

Can't understand what's happening.

PS: Anyone badmouthing the above rewrite is not understanding what's happening. Check back a year later for featur parity.

I wonder if software will be built inside of companies that have non-tech competencies going forward. The story of 2000-2025 was every traditional company becoming a tech company. The next 25 years might see tech companies without any offering besides "tech" being at a disadvantage because their entire offering is easily replicated.

In this hypothetical future, why would I (or my business) buy software from any company, when I can just prompt the equivalent into existence myself? We talk a lot about AI killing software engineering as a profession, but if the AI future comes, it will kill software development as a type of business.

Previous thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958850

One of the highlights in this for me is that we are starting to see clean room ports of software that companies would actually sue to protect.

Clearly the old "nobody would re-implement this" protection no longer works. I think we may stand on the brink of software losing a lot of it's magical DMCA protections, because it no longer matters. Or worse, the law becomes stricter.

They'll come up with DMCA II when this start being a big enough problem for them, don't you worry.

What DMCA protections could Adobe use against this? Surely the look-and-feel case established they can't trademark their signature keyboard shortcuts?

can't they say you broke the DRM? and sue? like for example same game companies even sue you for touching the running memory of the app

There are several of these clones floating around now. Who is furthest along in functionality and community support? Have any of these attracted a community of contributors?

I think this would be the defacto open source alternative to Adobe for the following reasons:

1. it's a rust based desktop app and not based on electron.

2. it's cross platform - available on win, mac, linux and wasm.

3. it's a suite of apps and not just a photoshop clone.

4. it's free and open source.

5. it looks good.

6. it's amassing a community of contributors.

There are other photoshop clones around but none with the ambition and scale of this project.

Wow! This actually gives a pretty promising alternative to GIMP on Linux. I was resigned in my fate to just deal with the awkwardness of GIMP and Inkscape after years of the creative cloud suite. It is clearly missing much at the moment, but if they can keep going this would be amazing. All packaged as AppImages so no need for the persistent junk running on the system.

The UI is great but even basic features are relatively incomplete. It has potential, I hope it gets to places.

I released something similar today: https://pixellect.app/

Though it was done roughly 1-2 months ago, a very busy work / private life kept me from finally releasing it. Interesting to see this being released on the same day. Though Pixellect has a different mission. Its not a clean room photoshop clone but more between Pixelmator and Photoshop and also features (I think) a bit more AI Integration. However Photocraft looks much more complete in terms of typical Photoshop features.

It was only 4 months ago that AI development was in question because there were no vibe-coded Photoshops. Here they are, and I think more will come.

Three of these launching the same day says something: the hard part used to be the sheer volume of features, and that's mostly gone now. What's left is whether anyone switches from Photoshop. We'd bet the thing people pay for is the one workflow they do daily.

I've been doing the same thing on lopsy.art.

I wonder if we're entering an era of boundless open-source clones and variants of proprietary software, from operating systems to games, products and services, perhaps even clones of entire companies.

I hope not, that sounds terrible waste of time and effort for creators and consumers alike.

Tower of Babel, but for software.

More like chainsaw for attention pie.

I think so.

I’m putting personal attention and tokens towards replacing Pioneer / Alpha Theta Rekordbox (music management for DJs).

The software is old and clunky, has a ton of features I don’t use, and can’t customize what I do use. And it’s enshittified with ads and popups and an expensive monthly subscription.

One big motivation for me is that it is FUN to rebuilt it with a coding agent. I’m learning a ton and the custom tools actually work.

I know I’m not alone.

https://deadca7.com/

The speed that the Premier clone launches is mad.

Can't encode 265 or AV1 though.

This is sweet. I've already modified it to have a couple features I miss from Krita

1: Create new document from image data on the clipboard

2: Custom grid options (set width AND height of grid cells, offsets, etc)

I stopped using PS a while ago when it stopped working well under Wine. Getting to know Photoshop again after so many years is really fun

Why is this flagged?

HN is filled with AI haters. They press flag at every positive thing about AI.

AI will never take over my developer job! AI.... just coded a more performant and lightweight adobe suite in rust? darn...

This is a more interesting one, though; some people might dislike Adobe's practices enough to be okay with an AI reimplementation of their suite.

I just wish I could still buy a 'Creative Suite' one off and keep using it instead of having to subscribe to these apps.

What's the catch?

Missing and incomplete features, missing templates, presets and it's likely to be abandoned as issues will start to pile up.

The user experience is also not great with professional looking AI apps, I've just tried PhotoCraft and couldn't paste an image from the clipboard. Clone stamp doesn't have a live update, etc.

Another catch is that it's... PhotoShop. I'm not particularly a fan of the whole workflow. Creatives learned to live and work with it over the decades, so it works, but it's not really an intuitive tool.

I'd recommend looking into Affinity which is a merged version of PS+Illustrator. The product feels like it at least tries to be a little different. It's also free.

Try lopsy.art. I've been at it for 6 months. Updating and building out features almost daily. It's a Rust/WASM engine too. Also open source. github.com/theseamusjames/lopsy.art.

I think there are about a dozen of these now.

The website is entirely vibcoded and is thus free of useful information. I haven't tried the applications

It hasn’t had a massive QA team (and customer base) go through all the missing features and bugs.

No doubt it’ll get better in time.

More likely completely neglected.

Is QA really the gap, though? The hard part of Photoshop is decades of PSD quirks, color management, and plugin compatibility. Has anyone opened a gnarly 200-layer file with smart objects in this and compared the output? I'd guess that's where it falls over, not UI bugs.

It's just slop. Tried to install it via flatpak. It has flatpak instructions in the readme. It does not ship the flatpak files it references in the readme.

It's slop, and there's no telling if it will still be maintained a year from now.

I don't think you realize the depth of Adobe creative suite hate, an entire generation of artists came up on Krita/Affinity because Adobe decided to vampire its customers.

...which is one of the benefits of it being open-sourced with a permissive license. If it stops being maintained, it can just be forked.

The "no one maintains AI slop" idiom is more for things which are bespoke and/or don't have much demand, and this clearly has demand.

Small nitpick, but it's been Creative Cloud since 2013, IIRC. Creative Suite was the boxed version. Also, "cleanroom" usually means the authors never saw the original code, which is a tough claim here. Maintenance is a fair worry though.

Has anybody with deeper knowledge of the originals tested the functionality?

Unlimited slop works! Title kinda misleading (at least appears so to me). No rev. eng. (so "cleanroom" to be relevant) takes place. "ACS clone" would be more appropriate.

The PSD round-trip thing is the part I'd test first. We hit the same issue with a PSD parser once: it renders fine, but saving drops layer effects and smart object metadata. Diff the re-saved file's layer tree against the original before trusting any export render.