PhotoCraft is an open-source desktop image editor that rebuilds Adobe Photoshop's toolset from scratch in pure Rust, including reading and writing real PSD files. It is aimed at people who already work in Photoshop — photographers, retouchers, designers, illustrators — and who would rather run that kind of program on a machine they own, offline, with the source in the open. There is a second audience too: developers, because every action in the editor is a command, so the app can be scripted or driven by an agent. The project is published by the ArtCraft team alongside their other "crafting apps", and its own README labels it early alpha.
What it does
The README describes a full layered editor rather than a filter toy: layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, type, vectors and brushes. Its pitch to existing users is blunt — if you know Photoshop, you already know PhotoCraft — and that is the authors' claim about their own interface, not an independent review.
The headline compatibility feature is PSD support. The project's own test suite is reported to re-save 307 of 309 PSD files correctly; that figure comes from the maintainers' tests, and no outside party has verified it. Treat it as a strong signal about intent and as a number to check against your own files before you trust a client's layered artwork to it.
It also has a smart selection tool that runs locally on your machine. No cloud service and no account are involved, which matters if your images are under NDA or simply not something you want uploaded.
How it works
The app is written entirely in Rust and composites on the GPU in a native window — explicitly not a web view wrapped in a desktop shell. That is the architectural choice the project leads with, and it is the reason a working graphics stack matters more here than it would for an Electron app.
Underneath the UI, every operation is modelled as a command. That is what makes automation possible without a separate plugin API: whatever the mouse can do, a script or an AI agent can issue as well. Automation is gated rather than wide open — it now requires file-access roots that you explicitly grant, plus a startup token, so an agent cannot quietly reach across your disk.
Getting started
The repository is github.com/storytold/photocraft. The README's badges list macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the web as native targets. Because compositing happens on the GPU rather than in a browser engine, you need a working GPU; beyond that, the project does not list memory, VRAM or specific chip requirements, so plan on testing it on your own hardware.
Nothing in the materials asks for money, an API key or an account: the smart selection model runs on your own machine, and the app is described as offline. Licensing is permissive — the repository is marked Apache-2.0 and the README badge offers MIT or Apache-2.0.
One practical caveat: the README as saved here is cut off before any build or install section, so there is no install command to quote and no mention of prebuilt binaries in Releases. Expect to clone and build the Rust project yourself, and check the project's own page at getartcraft.com/apps/photocraft and its Discord for packaged downloads.
When to use it / when not
The main catch is maturity. The project badges itself early alpha, and the repository is new — created at the end of September 2026, with pushes still landing days later. Interfaces, file handling and the two failing PSD cases are all moving targets.
Use it instead of Adobe Photoshop when you want a layered, PSD-aware editor that runs offline on hardware you control, or when you want an image editor an agent can drive end to end. Don't use it if you are shipping paid client work this week, if you depend on Photoshop plugins or Adobe's cloud workflow, or if you need a tool whose behaviour will not change between commits.
Alternatives
The comparison the project itself invites is with Photoshop, and that is the honest one: this is a clean-room reimplementation, written without access to Adobe's source. For free alternatives, most readers already know GIMP and Krita; the materials here make no claims about how PhotoCraft compares to them, so judge that yourself on the files you actually open. If what you want is not Photoshop specifically but another part of the same stack, the ArtCraft project lists further apps on its site.
Take this repository seriously if you are a Photoshop user who wants an exit route that does not depend on a subscription or a cloud account, or a developer who wants a scriptable raster editor an agent can operate under explicit file-access grants. Nearly six thousand stars within a week of its first commit say the idea has an audience, but the useful posture today is to build it, open a few of your own PSDs, and watch the repository — not to move production work onto an early alpha.