Someone Rebuilt Free, Open-Source Versions of Photoshop, Premiere, and Lightroom Using AI

Software engineer Brandon Thomas has built and released an open-source, free alternative to Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, including versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom (not Classic), Acrobat, After Effects, and InDesign. The apps live under the ArtCraft banner and are available for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Thomas founded ArtCraft nearly a year ago and previously worked as CEO of Storyteller.ai and as a software engineer at Square. He writes on Reddit that he used Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 AI LLM to recreate seven of Adobe’s most popular apps in Rust. Still, he says he is “not a casual vibe coder.”

“I’m a 15-year industry veteran who has written everything from six-nines payment rails that move billions of dollars of transaction volume a day to advanced robotics and optics automation. I’ve used Rust extensively for about a decade, and I know how to build and maintain large-scale Rust projects,” Thomas explains.

Thomas says the goal is to support artists with “the best tools” that are free, open source, and devoid of Adobe’s controversial subscriptions.

“They charged me the ‘cancellation fee’ on multiple occasions and I’ve hated them ever since,” Thomas says of Adobe in a Reddit comment.

Thomas also tried to post about ArtCraft on r/Adobe, by the way, but that post didn’t last long.

The software engineer says he hopes to reach “100% feature parity” with Adobe’s software “within a month,” which is certainly an ambitious target, even with AI code-building tools.

As expected, many people are extremely excited about the prospect of free alternatives to Adobe’s creative software. Adobe’s Creative Cloud software is quite pricey, and the company has established something of a monopoly in the creative software space overall. However, Adobe faces stiff competition in individual segments, like DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro in video editing, Affinity for Photoshop, and a bunch of RAW photo editing and organizational apps that offer features similar to Lightroom.

Thomas says the ArtCraft software suite is currently in alpha and hopes to reach beta stage very quickly. The Photoshop competitor, PhotoCraft, looks a lot like Photoshop. FilmCraft looks nearly identical to Premiere. LightCraft is an open-source take on Lightroom CC, although Thomas says he has received many requests for a Lightroom Classic competitor.

On GitHub, Thomas describes the ArtCraft apps as a “clean-room reimplementation” of Adobe’s apps, which is a fanciful, industry-standard way to describe a design that allegedly does not infringe on any copyright. It effectively reverse-engineers functionality and recreates it without relying on copyrighted assets or a protected codebase.

However, a potential factor to consider is whether the ArtCraft apps infringe on any of Adobe’s patents, which can cover various aspects of invented technologies, including appearance and functionality. It is possible to patent the design of an app, for example, or the specific way in which a software tool works. Adobe holds thousands of patents.

Legal precedent protects functionally identical software, provided it does not infringe protected designs or technologies. How that relates to ArtCraft’s apps is still an open question, given how new and early-stage the software is.

However, this legal framework was developed when reverse engineering software was so cost-intensive and time-consuming that undocumented code was itself a form of financial security. With the advent of AI, that’s no longer the case. How that will affect nearly every aspect of society, which runs on often-unseen software, remains to be seen. But that’s a topic for another day.

In ArtCraft’s case, the company hopes to achieve 100% feature parity with Adobe’s software across macOS, Windows, and Linux, the latter of which Adobe does not support at all, and believes it can do so relatively quickly without charging anyone a dime. However, “100% feature parity” is not necessarily 100% functionality parity or performance parity.

Many people who use Adobe’s software, perhaps even begrudgingly, inside a professional environment may have very little interest in gambling with open-source, AI-built software. In environments where pixel perfection, color accuracy, calibration, compatibility, plug-in use, efficiency, educational resources, and support matter a great deal, there is significantly less room for experimentation.

Clearly, though, based on the initial response across the internet to ArtCraft’s open-source Adobe competitors, plenty of people are excited to be on the ground floor of an open-source creative software suite. Given how much money the failed, controversial Abode Kickstarter earned for making a similar promise in 2023, it is not especially surprising that people are hungry for Adobe alternatives.

ArtCraft will be a very interesting platform to watch. It’s one thing to make a huge promise like this and another thing entirely to actually deliver. An app is more than just its codebase; it is also its stability, performance, functionality, and ability to handle the extreme edge cases that make or break professional success.

“If you’re worried this is just some one-off flash in the pan that will die, it isn’t,” Thomas promises.

The software is available on Github and ArtCraft. It can be used without a subscription, although there are subscriptions with generative AI credits to take advantage of various AI tools inside ArtCraft. Credits can also be purchased separately without subscriptions, and users can bring their own compute and third-party subscriptions into the apps for AI generations.

PetaPixel has asked Adobe for comment and will update this story in the event the company has anything to say about ArtCraft.

---

Image creditsArtCraft. Header image created using an asset licensed via Depositphotos.com.