Testing PhotoCraft: The AI‑Powered Photoshop Clone

Artificial intelligence has been sneaking into every corner of software lately, and the latest trick up its sleeve is to copy the very tools we pay subscription fees for. Enter PhotoCraft – a free, open‑source program that mimics Photoshop so closely you’d almost swear you’d opened the real thing.

The mind behind this ambitious clone is Brandon Thomas, a seasoned engineer who says he grew tired of “cancellation fees” and decided to let AI do the heavy lifting. Using Claude Opus 5.5 and the Rust language, Thomas and his small team have already spun out replicas of Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, and a handful of other Adobe staples. Their branding follows a simple pattern: Photoshop becomes PhotoCraft, Premiere turns into FilmCraft, and so on.

How does an AI‑generated copy even come together? Thomas mentions a technique he calls “vibe coding.” While the exact mechanics remain vague, the idea is that the model watches the original application, learns the UI layout, the menu hierarchy, even the behavior of individual tools, then writes code that reproduces those patterns from scratch – no literal copying of Adobe’s source code involved. It’s a kind of reverse‑engineering that leans heavily on pattern recognition rather than line‑by‑line theft.

Legal scholars are still debating whether that’s permissible. As Ars Technica points out, reverse engineering is usually tolerated if no copyrighted code is taken directly, but copying the “look and feel” of a product can still land you in hot water. Adobe hasn’t publicly commented yet, but the fact that PhotoCraft is currently listed as an “early alpha” on the ArtCraft website suggests they’re aware of the risk and are moving cautiously.

Downloading the suite is straightforward: the ArtCraft portal provides a launcher that lets you install any of the “Craft” apps. I focused on PhotoCraft because Photoshop is the one I actually use for work – cropping screenshots, stitching images together, tweaking colour balance, and exporting web‑ready graphics.

First impressions? It looks like Photoshop had a twin. The dark‑gray sidebars, the familiar toolbar icons, the exact ordering of menus – everything is reproduced with painstaking fidelity. Even the keyboard shortcuts match the Adobe defaults, which meant I could drop my hands onto the keyboard and keep working without a moment’s hesitation.

From a functional standpoint the core tools behave as you’d expect. The lasso, magic wand, clone stamp, and brush all respond, and the adjustment panels (levels, curves, hue/saturation) look and feel the same. I was able to open a PSD file, edit a layer mask, and export a JPEG without any major hiccups. In other words, the everyday tasks I need for a daily news site workflow were fully supported.

That said, the experience isn’t flawless. A few of the filters I rely on – notably the Content‑Aware Fill – are missing entirely. The brush engine, while usable, feels a touch less responsive under heavy strokes, and there are occasional glitches where a dialog fails to open until I restart the program. Plugin support is also non‑existent for now, so any third‑party extensions I normally rely on in Photoshop simply don’t show up.

Performance-wise, PhotoCraft runs surprisingly well on my mid‑range laptop. It launches faster than the subscription‑based version of Photoshop, probably because it’s a leaner codebase without the weight of Adobe’s legacy features. However, the lack of a robust ecosystem means you’ll have to forego many of the polish features that make Adobe’s suite feel “finished.”

So, is PhotoCraft ready to replace Photoshop? Not quite. It’s an impressive proof‑of‑concept that shows AI can produce a functional, UI‑identical replica of a major commercial app. But for professionals who need reliability, a mature plugin ecosystem, and legal certainty, the original still holds the crown.

Looking ahead, Thomas hints that a full‑featured version could reach 99 % parity with Adobe’s tools within months. If that timeline holds, we might soon be staring at a genuinely free alternative that covers everything from vector illustration to video editing. Until then, PhotoCraft is best thought of as an experimental sandbox – fun to play with, useful for learning, but not yet a full‑time workhorse.

Bottom line: AI‑driven cloning is here, and it’s startlingly good. PhotoCraft proves that the barrier between a proprietary powerhouse and an open‑source copy is getting thinner. Whether that spells trouble for big software firms or opens doors for a new wave of community‑driven tools, only time will tell.