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

PhotoCraft is the Photoshop member of ArtCraft's seven Craft apps, a native desktop image editor written from scratch in Rust and released in early October 2026. Its README calls it "an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop" and labels it early alpha. It is the most popular app in the suite: the repository, created on 30 September 2026, had 59,645 GitHub stars by 14 October, and version 0.8.2 shipped on 12 October.

The feature list, per the README, is large for a two-week-old project: 67 tools covering selection, healing, brush, type and vector work; 16 adjustment layers; layers, masks, layer styles and smart objects; 27 Photoshop blend modes plus six from Paint.NET; filters with live preview; and RGB, Grayscale, CMYK and Lab colour at 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel with ICC management. Over 500 commands sit in one registry, and every one of them can be driven from the UI, a command line, a JSON control channel or an MCP server, so an AI agent such as Claude can operate the app. The README says every Photoshop menu item is wired to a command, then adds that this "measures wiring, not behaviour".

File support is where it earns the word alternative. PSD and PSB open and save, and re-saving keeps the render of 307 of the 309 files in the psd-tools test set, per the README. Layered TIFF and OpenRaster read and write; Krita and Paint.NET files read; PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, BMP, OpenEXR and HDR all work; Affinity documents open read-only. HEIC is read-only, JPEG XL is unavailable, and RAW camera files are not mentioned.

Creative Bloq tested it on Windows on 13 October 2026 and found no compatibility problems with PSD, TIFF, JPG and PNG, a familiar layout, and three weaknesses: automatic selection less precise than Photoshop's, content-aware fill and spot healing "only just usable", and filters that would not preview. There is no generative AI of any kind. The README's own list of the biggest gaps is "AI/generative features, 15 missing tools, depth in typography and pro workflows, and plug-in compatibility", and it says PhotoCraft "is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work". Builds exist for macOS, Windows, 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.