photocraft

Project Overview

PhotoCraft is a desktop image editor for photographers, retouchers, and designers, built to handle layers, masks, and real PSD files offline. The whole application is written from scratch in Rust, with a separation between the document model, the command engine, and an egui interface; the canvas is composited by wgpu on Metal, Vulkan, DX12, or WebGPU, and the same code compiles to WebAssembly for the browser. Shortcuts follow Photoshop habits such as ⌘J and ⇧⌘D, and menus and panels sit where returning users expect them.

Layers, masks, type, vectors, and PSD files live in one native program with no Electron shell.

Key Features

• Adjustment layers: 16 adjustment layers, including Curves with per-channel editing, Levels with a live histogram, Black & White, Channel Mixer, and Gradient Map; each can be masked, reordered, or disabled
• Layer styles: drop shadow, inner shadow, outer and inner glow, bevel and emboss, satin, stroke, and color, gradient, and pattern overlays that copy and paste between layers
• Selections and masks: rectangular, elliptical, single-row, and single-column marquees, lassos, and Magic Wand, plus Quick Selection, Object Selection, Select Subject, and Select and Mask edge refinement
• Type layout: point and paragraph text edited directly on canvas, with Character and Paragraph controls for font, weight, size, leading, tracking, alignment, and color
• Vector shapes: rectangle, ellipse, triangle, polygon, line, pen, freeform pen, and curvature pen, with shape layers that unite, subtract, intersect, and exclude
• Filters: blur, sharpen, noise reduction, distortion, pixelate, stylize, and render categories, with every dialog previewing live through the selection on canvas
• Smart objects: smart filters and lossless transforms, with filter settings that can be changed, hidden, reordered, or masked at any time
• History and transform: a full history panel, History Brush, and Free Transform with scale, rotate, skew, distort, and perspective
• Color management: RGB, Grayscale, CMYK, and Lab documents at 8, 16, and 32 bits per channel, with ICC profile assignment and conversion plus soft proofing on ⌘Y
• Format support: PSD/PSB, layered TIFF, OpenRaster, GIMP XCF, Krita .kra, Paint.NET PDN3, SVG, flat PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, OpenEXR, and FITS files, plus the native .pcraft format

Editing Workflow

• Open a document: photocraft image.psd launches the desktop app with the file loaded and layers and text editable
• Non-destructive adjustment: stack Levels and Curves on a layer, then limit the effect with a mask so original pixels stay untouched
• Selection to mask: any selection becomes a layer mask, vector path, or shape in one step
• Preview before commit: filter settings preview live through the selection on canvas before they are written to the layer
• Step back freely: the history panel records each step, so you can return to any point or undo a single brush stroke

Files and Formats

• PSD round trips: re-saving renders the same for 307 of the 309 files in the psd-tools test set, and unmodeled raw blocks are carried over untouched
• Shape accuracy: 116 of 116 shape layers in the project's own PSD corpus match Photoshop pixels
• Large documents: PSB, 16-bit and 32-bit, CMYK, and Lab documents open natively
• Read-only formats: HEIC photos from iPhone and Mac and Affinity .af, .afdesign, .afphoto, and .afpub files open for viewing but are not written back
• Write limitations: AVIF output needs the optional avif build feature, and AVIF decoding and JPEG XL are unsupported

Target Audience

• Photographers who edit offline and keep layers intact
• Designers moving from Photoshop who do not want to relearn shortcuts
• Automation engineers who want to script retouching steps
• Image users working on Linux or FreeBSD

Quick Start

Desktop Install

1. On macOS, get photocraft-0.20.1-macos-universal.dmg and drag it into Applications
2. On Windows, get photocraft-0.20.1-windows-x64.msi or use the portable zip
3. On Linux, choose AppImage, .deb, .rpm, Flatpak, or tarball; the Flatpak ID is ai.storyteller.photocraft

Run from Source

1. Install Rust 1.95 or newer
2. Run

cargo run --release -p photocraft -- image.psd

3. For Japanese fonts, point CRAFT_FONTS_DIR at a craft-fonts checkout; otherwise system CJK fonts are used

CLI and Automation

1. Open, filter, and export in one command

photocraft-cli run wave.psd --cmd filter.sharpen.smartSharpen --params '{"amount":80}' --out wave-final.png

2. Batch an action list: photocraft-cli batch --actions grade.json --in ./raw --out ./graded
3. Serve agents over MCP: photocraft-cli mcp

System Requirements

Notes

• Early stage: AI generative features, about 15 missing tools, typography depth, and plug-in compatibility are still absent, so judge whether it fits daily professional work
• Wayland drag and drop: dropping files onto the window does not work in a Linux Wayland session; use File > Open or paste with Ctrl+V
• XWayland scaling: at 125%, 150%, or 175% fractional scaling an XWayland window is enlarged and blurred, while native Wayland stays sharp
• PSD is not byte-identical: a re-saved PSD rewrites image resources, layer records, and the composite; only the standalone photocraft-psd crate reproduces some files byte for byte
• Branding is not licensed: the code is MIT or Apache-2.0 dual-licensed, while ArtCraft names and icons follow separate terms