LightCraft Review (2026): Pricing, Features, Pros & Cons

LightCraft is the Lightroom member of ArtCraft's seven Craft apps, a non-destructive photo editor and library written from scratch in Rust and released in early October 2026. Its README calls it "a clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Lightroom", built from public specifications and black-box observation without reading Adobe binaries or GPL raw-processing code. It models Lightroom CC rather than Lightroom Classic. The repository had 12,275 GitHub stars on 14 October 2026, and version 0.7.1 shipped on 12 October. The README labels it alpha.

The project's own parity figures are candid. By feature count it puts itself at about 81% of Lightroom with core features at 98%; as a day-to-day replacement it rates the whole product nearer 61%, casual use at about 64%, and "typical working photographers" at about 49%. RAW decoding is LightCraft's own code and covers DNG, Canon CR2 and CR3, Sony ARW, Nikon NEF, Fujifilm RAF including X-Trans, Panasonic RW2, Leica RWL, Pentax PEF, Olympus ORF and uncompressed Samsung SRW, with some CR3 variants, compressed ORF and SRW, and Nikon HE NEF missing or partial.

Decoding is not colour. The README says camera colour is estimated for some Sony, Nikon, Panasonic, Fujifilm and Canon models, that "measured calibration is missing", and that other cameras get a neutral matrix; per-lens profiles are not started. The develop panels mirror Lightroom's: Light, Color, Effects, Tone Curve, Color Mixer, Color Grading, B&W, geometry and optics. Masking covers brush, gradients, luminance and colour range, and Sky, Subject and Background selection described as "classical heuristics". AI Denoise is in progress with user-installed weights; Super Resolution is not started. The library supports albums, smart albums, stacks and virtual copies, with 18 presets and export to JPEG, PNG, TIFF, WebP, AVIF and DNG.

Creative Bloq tested it on 13 October 2026 with a Canon EOS R5: CR3 files would not import straight from the camera, vignette and chromatic aberration needed manual correction for lack of camera profiles, the panels behaved as expected, sharpening was harsh with artefacts even at the default, and subject selection produced a radial mask instead of selecting the subject. Builds exist for Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD and the browser.

How it was built, and how to read the numbers. ArtCraft's founder Brandon Thomas, formerly CEO of Storyteller.ai, says the Craft apps were written in Rust with Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 as clean-room reimplementations from public documentation, with no Adobe code, icons or presets. The parity percentages quoted above are the project's own, measured by its team against Adobe's documentation; no outside party has verified them, and the project itself distinguishes between a feature that exists and one that behaves like Adobe's. We have not installed the app. Download only from github.com/storytold or getartcraft.com, because lookalike download sites appeared within days of launch. ArtCraft's paid plans, from $8 a month billed yearly, buy generative credits for the company's separate AI studio and are not needed to run any Craft app.