Someone Rebuilt Free, Open-Source Versions of Photoshop, Premiere, and Lightroom Using AI
Thomas says the alpha suite recreates seven Adobe apps in Rust and runs on macOS, Windows and Linux without a subscription.
- Earlier this week, software developer Brandon Thomas announced ArtCraft on Reddit, a free open-source suite of seven apps recreating Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro using Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 in Rust.
- Frustrated by Adobe's 'cancellation fee' policies, Thomas, a 15-year industry veteran, aims to provide artists with 'the best tools that are free, open source, and devoid of Adobe's controversial subscriptions.'
- Thomas describes ArtCraft as a 'clean-room reimplementation' that reverse-engineers Adobe's functionality without copyrighted assets, initially promising '100% feature parity' within a month before amending that '99% parity will take a while, but measured in months and not years.'
- Despite the software's 'super early alpha' state, early adopters on Hacker News expressed excitement for alternatives like PhotoCraft, FilmCraft, and LightCraft, with Thomas aiming to reach beta quickly.
- Long-Term viability hinges on whether ArtCraft infringes Adobe's thousands of patents covering software appearance and functionality, as AI-powered reverse engineering raises questions about legal frameworks designed when such work was prohibitively expensive.
29 Articles
29 Articles
The development of artificial intelligence is lowering the threshold for individual programmers to challenge large software companies, believes Juho Leinonen, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University.
One programmer claims to have recreated in Rust, with the help of Claude Opus 5.5, seven Adobe applications in free and open source versions. The Photoshop alternatives market has gained diversity in recent years, with proposals such as Canva and Affinity competing users to Adobe. Meanwhile, this has been [...]
Adobe in Trouble After Someone Reverse Engineered Adobe Creative Suite and Released It as Open Source
For years, illustrators, photographers, designers, and video editors have been held under the thumb of a single software company: Adobe. The infamous Adobe Creative Suite, later rebranded as the Creative Cloud — a change which brought about an end to true offline use — has long dogged creatives with its incredibly high subscription fees, representing an ironclad grip on the world of artists and other creatives. Though plenty of competitors have …
One Developer, One AI Model: The Open-Source Assault on Adobe's Creative Empire
Brandon Thomas used Claude Opus 5.5 to build seven open-source Rust apps that clone Adobe's Creative Cloud suite. PhotoCraft, FilmCraft and others deliver familiar interfaces and surprising PSD compatibility in early alpha. The project challenges subscription models while exposing AI's power to compress software development timelines. Progress continues.
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