Interesting but for photography at least, there's a massive hole: RAW support. What they've implemented is very limited and basic, nothing like parity with Lightroom or Photoshop. Just try loading a RAW photo into Lightroom/Photoshop and put the window next to Lightcraft/Photocraft - the results are completely different and not in a good way. Lightcraft's image looks like an amateur attempt at RAW processing from first principles, without any of the most basic colour profiles and adjustments that Lightroom applies. Photocraft doesn't even offer RAW processing, it just dumps the raster straight in.
I'd treat this as completely new, far from complete software heavily inspired by the Adobe Suite, rather than a "port".
But maybe folks who use workflows that don't involve RAW photos have better luck.
Or maybe you'll have better luck in a week when somebody familiar with RAW and a 20 year grudge against Adobe chooses to spend a day of tokens on the problem. Maybe me.
Rome wasn't built in a day, nor Adobe destroyed in a single git push. But they both shall fall.
That's exactly what I was thinking. It's only a matter of time. Surely the models, when well directed, can get most or all of the way there in short order.
And 500 levels of org tree, and grumpy customers that freak out if you change anything about their workflows, and decades of legacy code across dozens of micro-services, and backwards compatibility requirements with 20 year old formats...
I find it awfully funny that your response to someone creating the entire Adobe software suite in a day is “the colours aren’t rich enough for my liking”
Raw was a tough one when I tried it a few months ago -- I never thought about how individual color pixels on the sensor come together to form a color value for a point in an image file. Super interesting, and not at all standard between the different manufacturers. It's a hard problem for software to solve in a general way.
In two of its test cases, it changes the PSD on save so much that an export render differs. No RAW support. No folder sync or plugins. Limited brush support. It’s like the author never actually used their vibe-coded output and just decided it looked good enough.
There are several of these clones floating around now. Who is furthest along in functionality and community support? Have any of these attracted a community of contributors?
One of the highlights in this for me is that we are starting to see clean room ports of software that companies would actually sue to protect.
Clearly the old "nobody would re-implement this" protection no longer works. I think we may stand on the brink of software losing a lot of it's magical DMCA protections, because it no longer matters. Or worse, the law becomes stricter.
Though it was done roughly 1-2 months ago, a very busy work / private life kept me from finally releasing it. Interesting to see this being released on the same day. Though Pixellect has a different mission. Its not a clean room photoshop clone but more between Pixelmator and Photoshop and also features (I think) a bit more AI Integration. However Photocraft looks much more complete in terms of typical Photoshop features.
It was only 4 months ago that AI development was in question because there were no vibe-coded Photoshops. Here they are, and I think more will come.
Post AI - What is the future of making money with software? Desktop apps or SaaS? This certainly also would cut into the bottom line of software companies so they won't exist and then these companies are supposed to be the prime customers of the AI companies.
Can't understand what's happening.
PS: Anyone badmouthing the above rewrite is not understanding what's happening. Check back a year later for featur parity.
I wonder if software will be built inside of companies that have non-tech competencies going forward. The story of 2000-2025 was every traditional company becoming a tech company. The next 25 years might see tech companies without any offering besides "tech" being at a disadvantage because their entire offering is easily replicated.
I wonder if we're entering an era of boundless open-source clones and variants of proprietary software, from operating systems to games, products and services, perhaps even clones of entire companies.
I’m putting personal attention and tokens towards replacing Pioneer / Alpha Theta Rekordbox (music management for DJs).
The software is old and clunky, has a ton of features I don’t use, and can’t customize what I do use. And it’s enshittified with ads and popups and an expensive monthly subscription.
One big motivation for me is that it is FUN to rebuilt it with a coding agent. I’m learning a ton and the custom tools actually work.
Missing and incomplete features, missing templates, presets and it's likely to be abandoned as issues will start to pile up.
The user experience is also not great with professional looking AI apps, I've just tried PhotoCraft and couldn't paste an image from the clipboard. Clone stamp doesn't have a live update, etc.
Another catch is that it's... PhotoShop. I'm not particularly a fan of the whole workflow. Creatives learned to live and work with it over the decades, so it works, but it's not really an intuitive tool.
I'd recommend looking into Affinity which is a merged version of PS+Illustrator. The product feels like it at least tries to be a little different. It's also free.
It's just slop. Tried to install it via flatpak. It has flatpak instructions in the readme. It does not ship the flatpak files it references in the readme.
I don't think you realize the depth of Adobe creative suite hate, an entire generation of artists came up on Krita/Affinity because Adobe decided to vampire its customers.
Why would anyone help maintain this when they could vibe code their own though? Genuine question. As of the time I'm writing this there are already two other people linking their own Adobe clones in this comment section.
It takes a lot of tokens to vibecode something like this with the expected feature sets, and this domain is complex enough with enough edge cases and interactions such that it's infeasible to fully QA even programmatically.
Unlimited slop works! Title kinda misleading (at least appears so to me). No rev. eng. (so "cleanroom" to be relevant) takes place. "ACS clone" would be more appropriate.
I'd treat this as completely new, far from complete software heavily inspired by the Adobe Suite, rather than a "port".
But maybe folks who use workflows that don't involve RAW photos have better luck.
Rome wasn't built in a day, nor Adobe destroyed in a single git push. But they both shall fall.
"Hey ChatGPT, what would the sufficiently smart compiler argument look like in the LLM era?"
https://lopsy.art
I also let it build one btw: https://egeozcan.github.io/ketchup/ (not a PS clone, more amateur painting oriented)
Oh the times we live in.
That tracks.
So it's the Omarchy of Adobe-like software?
https://github.com/storytold/vectorcraft (Illustrator)
https://github.com/storytold/filmcraft (Premiere)
https://github.com/storytold/lightcraft (Lightroom)
https://github.com/storytold/printcraft (Acrobat Pro)
https://github.com/storytold/effectcraft (After Effects)
https://github.com/storytold/designcraft (InDesign)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922904
Clearly the old "nobody would re-implement this" protection no longer works. I think we may stand on the brink of software losing a lot of it's magical DMCA protections, because it no longer matters. Or worse, the law becomes stricter.
Though it was done roughly 1-2 months ago, a very busy work / private life kept me from finally releasing it. Interesting to see this being released on the same day. Though Pixellect has a different mission. Its not a clean room photoshop clone but more between Pixelmator and Photoshop and also features (I think) a bit more AI Integration. However Photocraft looks much more complete in terms of typical Photoshop features.
It was only 4 months ago that AI development was in question because there were no vibe-coded Photoshops. Here they are, and I think more will come.
Can't understand what's happening.
PS: Anyone badmouthing the above rewrite is not understanding what's happening. Check back a year later for featur parity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958850
I’m putting personal attention and tokens towards replacing Pioneer / Alpha Theta Rekordbox (music management for DJs).
The software is old and clunky, has a ton of features I don’t use, and can’t customize what I do use. And it’s enshittified with ads and popups and an expensive monthly subscription.
One big motivation for me is that it is FUN to rebuilt it with a coding agent. I’m learning a ton and the custom tools actually work.
I know I’m not alone.
https://deadca7.com/
The user experience is also not great with professional looking AI apps, I've just tried PhotoCraft and couldn't paste an image from the clipboard. Clone stamp doesn't have a live update, etc.
I'd recommend looking into Affinity which is a merged version of PS+Illustrator. The product feels like it at least tries to be a little different. It's also free.
No doubt it’ll get better in time.
The "no one maintains AI slop" idiom is more for things which are bespoke and/or don't have much demand, and this clearly has demand.