storytold/photocraft

Rust

10 commits

updated Oct 1, 2026

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Source	Message	Score	Date
	I nearly did this, but then I swapped to writing native desktop apps and egui - Rust is still worth it. I've stopped using Tauri and gone with 100% egui. It's cross platform and excellent, and if you give it design constraints it will look beautiful. Check out my 100% adobe clean room… on How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026	0	Oct 1, 2026

README

📷 Photocraft

The image editor you already know how to use.
Layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, type, vectors, brushes and real PSD files,
in a native app written entirely in Rust. Open source, offline, and yours.

Features · Everything in the box · PSD · Agents · Get started · Crafting Apps

Photocraft editing Hokusai's The Great Wave: a caption card with a drop shadow, type layers, Vibrance and Curves adjustment layers, and the Curves editor with its histogram
_{The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Katsushika Hokusai, c. 1831}

🎛️ Familiar by design

The menus, shortcuts, panels and tools are where your hands expect them, from ⌘J to ⇧⌘D. If you know Photoshop, you already know Photocraft.

⚡ Native and fast

A GPU compositor on wgpu (Metal, Vulkan, DX12, WebGPU), copy-on-write tiles and multithreaded filters. No Electron, no web view, no waiting.

🗂️ Real PSD files

Open, edit and save layered Photoshop documents. 134 of 135 real-world PSDs round-trip byte for byte.

🤖 Agent-ready

Every action is a command, so you can drive the same engine from the UI, the CLI, a JSON control channel or an MCP server.

Features

	Edit without regret. Adjustment layers keep every edit live. Stack Levels, Curves, Vibrance, Hue/Saturation and a dozen more, mask them to an area, reorder them, or turn them off, and your original pixels never change. 16 adjustment layers that also apply directly to pixels, including Curves with per-channel editing, Levels with a live histogram, Black & White, Channel Mixer, Gradient Map, Photo Filter, Selective Color and Color Lookup (.cube, .3dl, .look). Plus Shadows/Highlights, Replace Color, Match Color, HDR Toning, Desaturate and Equalize. _{Impression, Sunrise, Claude Monet, 1872}
Styles that sell the shot. Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer and Inner Glow, Bevel & Emboss, Satin, Stroke, and Color, Gradient and Pattern Overlay, live on any layer, including type. Patterns come from a library (built-ins, Edit › Define Pattern, `.pat` import/export) and PSD `Patt` blocks. Copy and paste styles between layers, hide all effects at once, and open styles straight from your PSDs, rendered to match Photoshop. _{Earthrise, William Anders / NASA, 1968}
	Selections that understand your image. Marquees, lassos and the Magic Wand for precision; Quick Selection, Object Selection and Select Subject when you want the computer to do the tracing; Select and Mask to refine hair-fine edges. Feather, expand, contract, smooth, grow, reselect. Turn any selection into a layer mask, a vector path or a shape. Smart selection runs on your machine, with no cloud and no account. _{Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665}
Type that sets beautifully. Point and paragraph text, edited right on the canvas, with full Character and Paragraph controls: font, weight, size, leading, tracking, alignment and colour. Type layers stay editable, take layer styles, and round-trip through PSD. _{Among the Sierra Nevada, California, Albert Bierstadt, 1868}
	Pixel-perfect vectors. Rectangle, Ellipse, Triangle, Polygon, Line and the Pen tool, with resolution-independent shape layers, gradient fills, and dashed, aligned strokes. Combine shapes (unite, subtract, intersect, exclude), keep paths in the Paths panel, use them as vector masks, or stroke and fill them. 116 of 116 shape layers in our PSD corpus match Photoshop's pixels. _{Water Lilies, Claude Monet, 1906}
See it before you commit. Every filter dialog previews live on the canvas, through your selection. Blurs (Gaussian, Box, Motion, Radial, Surface, Smart, Lens, Shape, and the Blur Gallery: Tilt-Shift, Iris, Field, Spin, Path), sharpening, Reduce Noise, distortions (Twirl, Wave, Ripple, Displace, Shear, Zig Zag…), Pixelate, Stylize (Oil Paint, Wind, Extrude…), Render (Clouds, Fibers, Lens Flare, Lighting Effects) and more. Run filters on a smart object and they stay editable: change, hide, reorder or mask them at any time. Large-radius blurs use running-sum box passes across all cores: a radius-180 Gaussian on 3.6 MP takes under a second. _{The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889}
	Shape it any way you like. Free Transform with scale, rotate, skew, distort and perspective; exact 90° and 180° rotations and flips; Transform Again. Layers, type, shapes, masks and selections all transform together. Full history, Toggle Last State and the History Brush mean every step can be undone, even one brush stroke at a time. _{The Tetons and the Snake River, Ansel Adams, 1942}
Ship it anywhere. Export As with format, quality, transparency and scale, plus a preview and an instant file-size estimate. Quick Export to PNG in one click. Choose a dark Pro theme, the airy Studio themes, or a Classic look. _{The Kiss, Gustav Klimt, 1907–1908}

Everything in the box

🧰 34 tools Move · Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee · Lasso · Polygonal Lasso · Magic Wand · Quick Selection · Object Selection · Crop · Eyedropper · Brush · Pencil · Mixer Brush · Color Replacement · Eraser · Clone Stamp · Healing Brush · Spot Healing · History Brush · Gradient · Paint Bucket · Blur · Sharpen · Smudge · Dodge · Burn · Sponge · Pen · Path Selection · Type · five Shape tools · Hand · Zoom	🖌️ A real brush engine Shape Dynamics, Scattering, Texture, Dual Brush, Color Dynamics, Transfer, Brush Pose, Wet Edges, Build-up and Smoothing (including Pulled String), driven by pen pressure, tilt, rotation and direction. Brush presets, Define Brush from Selection, and deterministic, replayable strokes.	🗃️ Layers, done properly Groups, clipping masks, pixel and vector masks, fill layers (solid, gradient and pattern), adjustment layers, live smart objects with smart filters and lossless transforms and warps, multi-layer selection with align, distribute and link, alpha channels and Quick Mask, 27 blend modes, opacity and fill, locks, colour labels, layer filters, merge, flatten, rasterize, Layer via Copy/Cut, Paste Into.
🎨 Any colour, any depth RGB, Grayscale, CMYK and Lab documents at 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel. Bit depth and colour model are runtime data, so every tool works at every depth. Real ICC colour management in pure Rust: embedded profiles, Assign and Convert to Profile with all four rendering intents and black point compensation, soft proofing (⌘Y) and Gamut Warning (⇧⌘Y) on the GPU.	🗂️ Formats PSD and PSB, plus PNG, JPEG, TIFF, WebP, GIF, BMP, TGA, ICO, QOI, PNM, OpenEXR, Radiance HDR and AVIF, with symmetric read and write at 8, 16 and 32 bits, and the native `.pcraft` format.	🪄 The everyday essentials Auto Tone, Contrast and Color · Equalize · Image and Canvas Size · Crop and Trim · Reveal All · Edit › Fill and Stroke · Copy Merged · Paste in Place · guides, rulers, grid and snapping · Actions record and replay · a command palette (⌘K).

PSD without compromise

Photocraft's PSD support is a standalone crate written from Adobe's public specification and tested against a corpus of real-world files.

Byte-exact round trips: 134 of 135 corpus files are written back identical, and anything we don't model yet (raw blocks, descriptors, extras) is preserved verbatim instead of being dropped.
Pixels that match: a composite oracle compares our render with Photoshop's own merged image, covering gradient interpolation (Classic, Perceptual and Linear), layer effects, shape strokes, clipping and fill opacity.
Large documents: PSB, 16 and 32-bit files, and CMYK and Lab documents open natively.

Built for agents

Every menu item, tool and dialog runs a command from one registry of 500+ commands. The UI, the CLI, the JSON control channel and the MCP server all call the same commands, so anything you can click, a script or an AI agent can do too.

# Headless: open, edit, save
photocraft-cli run wave.psd \
  --cmd filter.sharpen.smartSharpen     --params '{"amount":80}' \
  --cmd layer.newAdjustmentLayer.curves --params '{"points":[[0,0],[64,48],[192,212],[255,255]]}' \
  --out wave-final.png

# Apply one action list to a folder of images
photocraft-cli batch --actions grade.json --in ./raw --out ./graded

# Let an agent drive it over MCP (headless, or bridged to the running app)
photocraft-cli mcp

The desktop app also listens on a local control channel (photocraft --control) for inspecting UI state, driving tools with pointer events, and taking offscreen screenshots. Every image in this README was rendered that way. See docs/control-protocol.md.

Under the hood

Engine first: a pure-data document model and a command engine, with a thin egui UI on top. Layering is enforced at build time across 24 crates.
Two compositors: a CPU compositor serves as the reference oracle, and a wgpu compositor puts the canvas on the GPU. They are tested against each other.
Copy-on-write tiles: 256² sparse tiles make undo cheap and huge canvases light, and effect maps are cached per layer state.
Runs in the browser: the whole engine and UI compile to WebAssembly.
Clean-room: implemented from public specs and observed behaviour only. No proprietary code, shaders or assets.
Tested: more than 1,600 tests, including PSD round trips, synthetic generators, compositor oracles and multi-depth checks.

Get started

git clone https://github.com/storytold/photocraft
cd photocraft
cargo run --release -p photocraft -- image.psd   # the desktop app
cargo test --workspace                           # the test suite

New contributors and AI agents: start with AGENTS.md, then docs/.

Installers for macOS, Windows, Linux and the web are attached to each GitHub release. Maintainers: docs/releasing.md explains how releases are built, signed and published.

Status: Photocraft is in early alpha. The core editing workflow is here, and we're working toward full Photoshop parity milestone by milestone (see docs/roadmap.md). Progress is measured, not guessed: cargo xtask parity checks every item in Photoshop's menu tree against the live command registry and writes docs/parity.md. Expect rough edges, and please file issues.

Crafting Apps

Open-source, clean-room, pure-Rust creative apps that share the same conventions: native on macOS, Windows and Linux, in the browser via WebAssembly, and fully drivable by agents.

📷 PhotoCraft

Layered image editing and compositing: the Photoshop workflow.

✏️ DrawCraft

Vector illustration: the Illustrator workflow.

🎬 FilmCraft

Non-linear video editing: the Premiere Pro workflow.

🌄 LightCraft

Photo library and non-destructive raw developer: the Lightroom workflow.

📄 PrintCraft

PDF viewing and editing: the Acrobat Pro workflow.

_{Built by the artcraft team. Licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0.

Every artwork shown is in the public domain (Wikimedia Commons, NASA, U.S. National Archives); sources are listed in docs/images/SOURCES.md.

Photoshop is a trademark of Adobe Inc. Photocraft is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Adobe.}

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storytold/photocraft

Rust

10 commits

updated Oct 1, 2026

See the code

See what people are saying

Newest first

Most points

Source	Message	Score	Date
	I nearly did this, but then I swapped to writing native desktop apps and egui - Rust is still worth it. I've stopped using Tauri and gone with 100% egui. It's cross platform and excellent, and if you give it design constraints it will look beautiful. Check out my 100% adobe clean room… on How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026	0	Oct 1, 2026

README

📷 Photocraft

Features · Everything in the box · PSD · Agents · Get started · Crafting Apps

🎛️ Familiar by design

The menus, shortcuts, panels and tools are where your hands expect them, from ⌘J to ⇧⌘D. If you know Photoshop, you already know Photocraft.

⚡ Native and fast

A GPU compositor on wgpu (Metal, Vulkan, DX12, WebGPU), copy-on-write tiles and multithreaded filters. No Electron, no web view, no waiting.

🗂️ Real PSD files

Open, edit and save layered Photoshop documents. 134 of 135 real-world PSDs round-trip byte for byte.

🤖 Agent-ready

Every action is a command, so you can drive the same engine from the UI, the CLI, a JSON control channel or an MCP server.

Features

	Edit without regret. Adjustment layers keep every edit live. Stack Levels, Curves, Vibrance, Hue/Saturation and a dozen more, mask them to an area, reorder them, or turn them off, and your original pixels never change. 16 adjustment layers that also apply directly to pixels, including Curves with per-channel editing, Levels with a live histogram, Black & White, Channel Mixer, Gradient Map, Photo Filter, Selective Color and Color Lookup (.cube, .3dl, .look). Plus Shadows/Highlights, Replace Color, Match Color, HDR Toning, Desaturate and Equalize. _{Impression, Sunrise, Claude Monet, 1872}
Styles that sell the shot. Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer and Inner Glow, Bevel & Emboss, Satin, Stroke, and Color, Gradient and Pattern Overlay, live on any layer, including type. Patterns come from a library (built-ins, Edit › Define Pattern, `.pat` import/export) and PSD `Patt` blocks. Copy and paste styles between layers, hide all effects at once, and open styles straight from your PSDs, rendered to match Photoshop. _{Earthrise, William Anders / NASA, 1968}
	Selections that understand your image. Marquees, lassos and the Magic Wand for precision; Quick Selection, Object Selection and Select Subject when you want the computer to do the tracing; Select and Mask to refine hair-fine edges. Feather, expand, contract, smooth, grow, reselect. Turn any selection into a layer mask, a vector path or a shape. Smart selection runs on your machine, with no cloud and no account. _{Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665}
Type that sets beautifully. Point and paragraph text, edited right on the canvas, with full Character and Paragraph controls: font, weight, size, leading, tracking, alignment and colour. Type layers stay editable, take layer styles, and round-trip through PSD. _{Among the Sierra Nevada, California, Albert Bierstadt, 1868}
	Pixel-perfect vectors. Rectangle, Ellipse, Triangle, Polygon, Line and the Pen tool, with resolution-independent shape layers, gradient fills, and dashed, aligned strokes. Combine shapes (unite, subtract, intersect, exclude), keep paths in the Paths panel, use them as vector masks, or stroke and fill them. 116 of 116 shape layers in our PSD corpus match Photoshop's pixels. _{Water Lilies, Claude Monet, 1906}
See it before you commit. Every filter dialog previews live on the canvas, through your selection. Blurs (Gaussian, Box, Motion, Radial, Surface, Smart, Lens, Shape, and the Blur Gallery: Tilt-Shift, Iris, Field, Spin, Path), sharpening, Reduce Noise, distortions (Twirl, Wave, Ripple, Displace, Shear, Zig Zag…), Pixelate, Stylize (Oil Paint, Wind, Extrude…), Render (Clouds, Fibers, Lens Flare, Lighting Effects) and more. Run filters on a smart object and they stay editable: change, hide, reorder or mask them at any time. Large-radius blurs use running-sum box passes across all cores: a radius-180 Gaussian on 3.6 MP takes under a second. _{The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889}
	Shape it any way you like. Free Transform with scale, rotate, skew, distort and perspective; exact 90° and 180° rotations and flips; Transform Again. Layers, type, shapes, masks and selections all transform together. Full history, Toggle Last State and the History Brush mean every step can be undone, even one brush stroke at a time. _{The Tetons and the Snake River, Ansel Adams, 1942}
Ship it anywhere. Export As with format, quality, transparency and scale, plus a preview and an instant file-size estimate. Quick Export to PNG in one click. Choose a dark Pro theme, the airy Studio themes, or a Classic look. _{The Kiss, Gustav Klimt, 1907–1908}

Everything in the box

🧰 34 tools Move · Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee · Lasso · Polygonal Lasso · Magic Wand · Quick Selection · Object Selection · Crop · Eyedropper · Brush · Pencil · Mixer Brush · Color Replacement · Eraser · Clone Stamp · Healing Brush · Spot Healing · History Brush · Gradient · Paint Bucket · Blur · Sharpen · Smudge · Dodge · Burn · Sponge · Pen · Path Selection · Type · five Shape tools · Hand · Zoom	🖌️ A real brush engine Shape Dynamics, Scattering, Texture, Dual Brush, Color Dynamics, Transfer, Brush Pose, Wet Edges, Build-up and Smoothing (including Pulled String), driven by pen pressure, tilt, rotation and direction. Brush presets, Define Brush from Selection, and deterministic, replayable strokes.	🗃️ Layers, done properly Groups, clipping masks, pixel and vector masks, fill layers (solid, gradient and pattern), adjustment layers, live smart objects with smart filters and lossless transforms and warps, multi-layer selection with align, distribute and link, alpha channels and Quick Mask, 27 blend modes, opacity and fill, locks, colour labels, layer filters, merge, flatten, rasterize, Layer via Copy/Cut, Paste Into.
🎨 Any colour, any depth RGB, Grayscale, CMYK and Lab documents at 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel. Bit depth and colour model are runtime data, so every tool works at every depth. Real ICC colour management in pure Rust: embedded profiles, Assign and Convert to Profile with all four rendering intents and black point compensation, soft proofing (⌘Y) and Gamut Warning (⇧⌘Y) on the GPU.	🗂️ Formats PSD and PSB, plus PNG, JPEG, TIFF, WebP, GIF, BMP, TGA, ICO, QOI, PNM, OpenEXR, Radiance HDR and AVIF, with symmetric read and write at 8, 16 and 32 bits, and the native `.pcraft` format.	🪄 The everyday essentials Auto Tone, Contrast and Color · Equalize · Image and Canvas Size · Crop and Trim · Reveal All · Edit › Fill and Stroke · Copy Merged · Paste in Place · guides, rulers, grid and snapping · Actions record and replay · a command palette (⌘K).

PSD without compromise

Photocraft's PSD support is a standalone crate written from Adobe's public specification and tested against a corpus of real-world files.

Byte-exact round trips: 134 of 135 corpus files are written back identical, and anything we don't model yet (raw blocks, descriptors, extras) is preserved verbatim instead of being dropped.
Pixels that match: a composite oracle compares our render with Photoshop's own merged image, covering gradient interpolation (Classic, Perceptual and Linear), layer effects, shape strokes, clipping and fill opacity.
Large documents: PSB, 16 and 32-bit files, and CMYK and Lab documents open natively.

Built for agents

# Headless: open, edit, save
photocraft-cli run wave.psd \
  --cmd filter.sharpen.smartSharpen     --params '{"amount":80}' \
  --cmd layer.newAdjustmentLayer.curves --params '{"points":[[0,0],[64,48],[192,212],[255,255]]}' \
  --out wave-final.png

# Apply one action list to a folder of images
photocraft-cli batch --actions grade.json --in ./raw --out ./graded

# Let an agent drive it over MCP (headless, or bridged to the running app)
photocraft-cli mcp

Under the hood

Engine first: a pure-data document model and a command engine, with a thin egui UI on top. Layering is enforced at build time across 24 crates.
Two compositors: a CPU compositor serves as the reference oracle, and a wgpu compositor puts the canvas on the GPU. They are tested against each other.
Copy-on-write tiles: 256² sparse tiles make undo cheap and huge canvases light, and effect maps are cached per layer state.
Runs in the browser: the whole engine and UI compile to WebAssembly.
Clean-room: implemented from public specs and observed behaviour only. No proprietary code, shaders or assets.
Tested: more than 1,600 tests, including PSD round trips, synthetic generators, compositor oracles and multi-depth checks.

Get started

git clone https://github.com/storytold/photocraft
cd photocraft
cargo run --release -p photocraft -- image.psd   # the desktop app
cargo test --workspace                           # the test suite

New contributors and AI agents: start with AGENTS.md, then docs/.

Installers for macOS, Windows, Linux and the web are attached to each GitHub release. Maintainers: docs/releasing.md explains how releases are built, signed and published.

Status: Photocraft is in early alpha. The core editing workflow is here, and we're working toward full Photoshop parity milestone by milestone (see docs/roadmap.md). Progress is measured, not guessed: cargo xtask parity checks every item in Photoshop's menu tree against the live command registry and writes docs/parity.md. Expect rough edges, and please file issues.

Crafting Apps

Open-source, clean-room, pure-Rust creative apps that share the same conventions: native on macOS, Windows and Linux, in the browser via WebAssembly, and fully drivable by agents.

Similar repos

storytold/drawcraft

same org

storytold/filmcraft

same org

storytold/artcraft

ArtCraft is an intentional crafting engine for artists, designers, and filmmakers

2,119

same org

stubbb/c-shop

Graphic editor supporting agentic workflows with deep learning modules.

eolix/photosuite

273

SethRobinson/Patchy

Open-source image editor focused on PSD compatibility and workflows familiar to Adobe Photoshop…

419

CyberTimon/RapidRAW

A beautiful, non-destructive, and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor built with performance in mind.

10,270

TareqAmeer/Chroma-App

CHRO-MA-SMITH: photo gallery and studio for editing RAW photos anywhere.

Languages

Rust

98.7%

storytold/photocraft

See what people are saying

README

📷 Photocraft

🎛️ Familiar by design

⚡ Native and fast

🗂️ Real PSD files

🤖 Agent-ready

Features

Edit without regret.

Styles that sell the shot.

Selections that understand your image.

Type that sets beautifully.

Pixel-perfect vectors.

See it before you commit.

Shape it any way you like.

Ship it anywhere.

Everything in the box

🧰 34 tools

🖌️ A real brush engine

🗃️ Layers, done properly

🎨 Any colour, any depth

🗂️ Formats

🪄 The everyday essentials

PSD without compromise

Built for agents

Under the hood

Get started

Crafting Apps

Similar repos

Languages

storytold/photocraft

See what people are saying

README

📷 Photocraft

🎛️ Familiar by design

⚡ Native and fast

🗂️ Real PSD files

🤖 Agent-ready

Features

Edit without regret.

Styles that sell the shot.

Selections that understand your image.

Type that sets beautifully.

Pixel-perfect vectors.

See it before you commit.

Shape it any way you like.

Ship it anywhere.

Everything in the box

🧰 34 tools

🖌️ A real brush engine

🗃️ Layers, done properly

🎨 Any colour, any depth

🗂️ Formats

🪄 The everyday essentials

PSD without compromise

Built for agents

Under the hood

Get started

Crafting Apps

Similar repos

Languages