ArtCraft

About

ArtCraft is a family of free, open-source creative apps that set out to replace the Adobe Creative Cloud lineup one tool at a time. PhotoCraft takes on Photoshop, VectorCraft Illustrator, FilmCraft Premiere Pro, LightCraft Lightroom, EffectCraft After Effects, DesignCraft InDesign and PdfCraft Acrobat, and the roster has since grown to thirteen apps, including ones for interface design, word processing, audio, slides, CAD and spreadsheets. It is for artists, photographers and editors who are tired of renting their tools, and for anyone curious to watch a whole creative suite take shape in public. The suite comes from Brandon Thomas, the founder behind Storyteller.ai and FakeYou, and it was built largely with AI: Thomas says he wrote the apps in pure Rust with Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, while stressing that he is a veteran engineer with about a decade of Rust experience, not a casual vibe coder. Each app is described as a clean-room reimplementation that uses no Adobe code. The first repositories went public at the end of September 2026, PhotoCraft passed tens of thousands of GitHub stars within days, and outlets such as PetaPixel and Notebookcheck covered the launch. Be clear-eyed, though: PhotoCraft is labeled early alpha and most of the other apps are still marked as in development, so expect gaps and rough edges. Highlights: • PhotoCraft edits real PSD files with layers, masks, layer styles, type and vector shapes • Non-destructive adjustment layers such as Levels, Curves, Vibrance and Hue/Saturation • FilmCraft offers a timeline video editor with a color-grading workspace • LightCraft is a local photo library and raw developer • One ArtCraft Launcher installs every app and keeps them updated • Native apps written in Rust, with several also running in the browser • The companion ArtCraft studio adds controllable AI image and video generation with 3D compositing and character posing The Craft apps are free and open source (Apache-2.0, with some repositories dual-licensed MIT/Apache) and there is nothing to buy to use them. The separate ArtCraft AI studio offers optional credit subscriptions for generation, starting at US$10 a month, and also works with your own compute or third-party accounts. The apps run on macOS, Windows and Linux, and several also run on the web.

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