PhotoCraft, a Rust Photoshop Clone With 14,600 Stars, Round-Trips 307 of 309 PSD Test Files

PhotoCraft, a Photoshop-style image editor written entirely in Rust, had 14.6k GitHub stars and 1.9k forks when we fetched its repository on October 7, 2026. It reached the Lobsters front page the same day.

The README is blunt about where it stands. It is "early alpha," and "it is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work."

What PhotoCraft implements

The ArtCraft Team builds it and licenses it MIT or Apache-2.0, at the user's choice. The README lists 34 tools, 16 adjustment layers including Curves, Levels and Vibrance, layer styles such as Drop Shadow and Bevel and Emboss, smart objects with editable filters, vector shapes and full type controls.

Colour depth runs to 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel, with ICC colour management and soft proofing. Rendering goes through wgpu, so one compositor covers Metal, Vulkan, DirectX 12 and WebGPU. Targets are macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and WebAssembly.

The project counts more than 500 commands in one registry and over 1,700 tests across 365-plus commits. Those are the project's own figures.

The clean-room claim and the PSD test

PhotoCraft says it was "implemented from public specs and observed behaviour only. No proprietary code, shaders or assets." That is the developer's description and we have no way to audit it from the repository page.

The checkable number is file fidelity. The README says 307 of 309 files in the psd-tools test set render identically after a round-trip save. psd-tools is a separate MIT-licensed Python package with 1.5k stars that reads and writes PSD files. It says Adobe's published specification is incomplete, which is why a round-trip test is the fair measure.

Measure	PhotoCraft figure	Who supplied it
PSD round-trip	307 of 309 files identical	README
Tools	34	README
Adjustment layers	16	README
Open issues	165 on October 7	GitHub issues page

What the issue tracker shows

The newest issues, all dated October 7, include a mouse pointer that disappears with any selection tool, "Sample All Layers" not working in v0.3.0 for Spot Healing and Healing Brush, and a smart object Stack Mode panic when the source has no visible layers. Two fix reports concern PSD export, one about artboard guide indices and one about a dropped bit in a layer flag.

Several issues describe crashes and unbounded allocations. None of the ten we read raised licensing, trademarks or Adobe.

Stars are not adoption. The count says how many people bookmarked the project in a week, not how many opened a real file in it. The README lists the gaps itself: no generative or AI features, roughly twenty missing tools, limited advanced typography, and no plugin compatibility.

Who should look at it

A developer who needs to read and write PSDs from Rust has a candidate to test against their own files. A designer with a paid Photoshop licence and deadlines has no reason to move.

Compare it with other fast-rising repos we have covered: REA, which gave coding agents a disassembler, and VB6 Studio Web, which rebuilds a Windows-era IDE in a browser. Both are early and both list their limits openly.

The next thing to watch is whether the 307-of-309 figure holds on files PhotoCraft's authors did not pick.