Free, Open-Source Copies of Photoshop, Premiere, and Lightroom are Here

Software engineer Brandon Thomas has unveiled a suite of free, open-source creative apps, designed to serve as alternatives to Adobe's popular software. The ArtCraft suite, available for macOS, Windows, and Linux, includes replacements for Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects, and InDesign. Thomas founded ArtCraft nearly a year ago, prior to his roles as CEO of Storyteller.ai and as a software engineer at Square.

He utilized Anthropic's Opus 5.5 AI model to help recreate the seven applications in the Rust programming language, leveraging his extensive background in software engineering and Rust development.

The ArtCraft applications closely mirror their Adobe counterparts. PhotoCraft is similar to Photoshop, FilmCraft follows Premiere's layout, and LightCraft serves as an open-source alternative to Lightroom CC. While Thomas aims for 100% feature parity with Adobe within a month, he acknowledges that this may not translate to identical performance, stability, or functionality in professional workflows.

Critical areas such as color accuracy, calibration, plugin compatibility, efficiency, support, and handling edge cases are still key focuses for professional users.

Thomas describes the projects as clean-room reimplementations, meaning they aim to reproduce similar functionality without using Adobe's copyrighted source code or assets. However, patent-related concerns could still arise due to Adobe's extensive patent portfolio. Despite this, ArtCraft's core applications can be used without a subscription, with optional subscriptions offering generative AI credits for AI features. Users can also purchase credits separately or use their own computing resources for generation tasks.

The motivation behind the project stems from Thomas's frustration with Adobe's subscription model and associated cancellation fees. As Creative Cloud incurs recurring costs, demand for Adobe alternatives has grown, particularly as users seek to avoid recurring expenses. ArtCraft seeks to address this by providing a comprehensive suite of creative software alternatives, rather than focusing on individual applications.

The project is intended for long-term maintenance, with the software currently available on ArtCraft and GitHub in an early alpha stage.