Review · 2026-10-14
PhotoCraft review: a remarkable alpha — not yet a Photoshop replacement
PhotoCraft made headlines as the Photoshop clone "written by AI in ten days". Reality is more interesting: it is an ongoing open-source Rust project with unusually rigorous self-measurement. Here is a grounded assessment based on the project's own published parity data.
What it gets right
- Genuinely Photoshop-shaped: menus, shortcuts and panels land where your hands expect them
- Real PSD files — open, edit and re-save layered documents (render fidelity measured at 307/309 psd-tools test files)
- Pure Rust + wgpu: fast startup and GPU compositing, no Electron or webview
- Free and open source (MIT / Apache-2.0) — desktop app and web build
- Every action is a command: drivable from CLI, JSON control channel or MCP, great for automation
Where it falls short
- Early alpha: measured "ready for real work" is around 45%, with 579 open issues at last count
- Performance budgets largely missed yet (22 of 25 over budget) — large multi-layer files can chug
- PSD files it writes are not always accepted cleanly by Photoshop yet
- AI generative features are essentially absent (10% parity), unlike Photoshop or web editors with AI add-ons
Who should use it
If your work is retouching, compositing, cut-outs, design layout or PSD exchange at everyday scale, PhotoCraft already covers the core workflows end to end — and costs nothing. If you depend on rock-solid performance with 150-layer files, plug-ins, or generative AI fill, you still need Photoshop today. For everyone in between, keep it installed next to whatever you use now.
The web version
The project compiles the same engine to WebAssembly, so you can try it with zero commitment —open the editor on this site. Nothing installs, nothing uploads.
Verdict
3.5 / 5 today, trending up fast. As an alpha it is ahead of any comparable open-source effort, and its public parity roadmap means the gaps are tracked, not hidden. Watch this project. Ready to test it yourself? Start with thedownload guide.