Eight Rust apps, one team, and a PSD parser written from Adobe’s public spec
Somebody on Bluesky summed up the PhotoCraft repo as "AI stole Photoshop and now it's open source?" That's a catchy line, and it's also not what the README says. So I went through the READMEs for storytold/artcraft and the apps around it to see what's actually there. Caveat before anything else: GitHub blocks automated browsing of source trees, so this is a read of the READMEs and public…
An open-source image and video studio called ArtCraft has been created by a team of developers using Rust. The suite consists of several independent apps, each designed to work on its own and target specific Adobe workflows. PhotoCraft, the most documented app, is an early alpha that is not a complete Photoshop replacement, but it does offer many features such as layers, masks, type, real PSD files, and a GPU compositor.
The app is written from scratch in Rust and is meant to be a standalone tool, not affiliated with Adobe. The team has put in a lot of effort into creating a file format that closely matches Adobe's PSD specification, with a re-saved file only being slightly different. PhotoCraft also has an MCP server, allowing an AI agent to drive the editor through a JSON control channel.
While there are no official statements from Adobe or any legal action taken, the project has sparked interest among developers and creatives who are curious about Rust and WebAssembly editors.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
