What a world we live in, A team in the US have created from scratch clones of a whole host of Adobe software, almost identical workflows and have open sourced them, the lightcraft (lightroom alternative) is very much still in beta at the moment so I wouldn't recommend replacing anything yet or testing on your existing photo libraries but for those not using lightroom currently it might be worth a punt.

ArtCraft

Crafting Apps: open-source creative tools

Image editing, vector illustration, video, photography, PDFs, motion graphics and page layout: seven native, open-source apps from the ArtCraft team, built in Rust and free to use.

ahh damn, just realised I posted in the wrong place, could a mod move to the general chat please

Edited October 10Oct 10 by wyvern

Thank you for the info, I will have a look.

Very nice, will install it and try it for a bit.

I also enjoyed RapidRaw, fast development cycle and quick bit of software, although lack of advanced library management, which is key for many of us

1 hour ago, waterpixel said:

Very nice, will install it and try it for a bit.

I also enjoyed RapidRaw, fast development cycle and quick bit of software, although lack of advanced library management, which is key for many of us

Will have a look at rapid raw too then, thank you! This has an uber fast development cycle too, even from me downloading it , it went up a minor version, I know some raw formats weren't supported yet in v0.30 but will check the latest release notes.

Nice first pass, but NO raw input capability yet. Subject detection is terrible at least for my stuff. I would really like a Lightroom classic version but that might be too tough.

Bill

Interestng, thanks. I will have to give it a test drive.

I’ve given Lightcraft a quick try; with RAW files accompanied by .xmp sidecar files, it seems to preserve the image development settings.

I noticed it’s a bit slow to load images, though I assume that will improve.

What I personally need is the ability to manage keywords for a large image library—something I haven't found in the program so far.

It's a monumental and ambitious project. It's still really in its infancy. We have to give it time and trust.

It depends on how many programmers it will attract and the speed at which new versions will come out.

Really an amazing initiative.

I've just tried out PDFCraft, and honestly, it's very fast and smooth—I found it quite spectacular.

The same group have released reverse engineered Office today.

I suspect an absolute mountain of patent/IP infringement claims, DMCA issues etc to start shortly. (and yes given Adobe betting the farm on AI which is based on IP theft, i do see the irony).

Edited October 11Oct 11 by Rich W

Wow, reminds me of when Napster came out... 😄
I hope they do a FinalCraft and VinciCraft...

As developer I can say the problem will be that you can‘t handle so many apps in the same time without a bigger team. Ps, Illustrator, indesign, Lightroom,… They should have been starting build app by app and really finish them otherwise you can end up building a lot but nothing is really perfect and in a few months nobody remember them. But that’s my opinion anyway nice projects and hope I‘m wrong.

46 minutes ago, Jurgen said:

As developer I can say the problem will be that you can‘t handle so many apps in the same time without a bigger team. Ps, Illustrator, indesign, Lightroom,… They should have been starting build app by app and really finish them otherwise you can end up building a lot but nothing is really perfect and in a few months nobody remember them. But that’s my opinion anyway nice projects and hope I‘m wrong.

I do worry about this too as they’ve just released some Microsoft office cloned tools too. Hopefully they can get a good community contributing.

Edit: looking at their commit history it looks like they’re burning a bunch of AI tokens on this. So not just humans working on the code.

Edited October 12Oct 12 by wyvern

Yes this is typical vibe coding today this tomorrow that 😂 Now from 10 apps will be 15 tomorrow 50 that’s the problem I was talking about

Edited October 12Oct 12 by Jurgen

I don't get why I see a lot of people writing about reverse engineering. It seems everything is coded in Rust from scratch. Do they reverse engineered functionalities?

3 hours ago, Jurgen said:

As developer I can say the problem will be that you can‘t handle so many apps in the same time without a bigger team. Ps, Illustrator, indesign, Lightroom,… They should have been starting build app by app and really finish them otherwise you can end up building a lot but nothing is really perfect and in a few months nobody remember them. But that’s my opinion anyway nice projects and hope I‘m wrong.

They would beed an entire team just for one app and they released two full suites. It's really strange.

I don't get why I see a lot of people writing about reverse engineering. It seems everything is coded in Rust from scratch. Do they reverse engineered functionalities?

Me neither. What they did was vibe-code Adobe products. Claude is smart enough to create something like this, at least at first glance. Open a RAW file in Lightroom and then in this clone (I watched a video), and you can immediately see that nobody seems to care about camera profiles and things like that.

Yes, but this is exactly the stuff you need, not just the fancy UI. You also need a solid understanding of software architecture. Otherwise, future features can break existing functionality. I don't want to go into too much detail here.

Is AI bad at coding? As a professional developer, I can say that we use AI for around 90% of our coding. But there's a big difference: I stay in control. We understand the code, know what we're doing, and make changes or change direction at the right moment.

The only thing I can say is that building one of this apps per developer is possible with enough knowledge, time, and experience. Anything beyond that is simply not sustainable in the long run.

They would beed an entire team just for one app and they released two full suites. It's really strange.

We in old school fashion where we coded line by line you are absolutely right. With support of AI and knowledge a single developer can do big things already on his own.

54 minutes ago, Jurgen said:

you can immediately see that nobody seems to care about camera profiles and things like that.

To be fair, Adobe still does not have the latest profiles for A7V (released last year) and they have tons of devs behind it (or at least i hope). It's a sidenote comment, but there are also a lot of issues with Adobe and i really hope that open source projects like this, rapidraw or rawtherapee will accelerate the development in a good way of Adobe (fixing functionalities rather than adding ai slop features)

To be fair, Adobe still does not have the latest profiles for A7V (released last year) and they have tons of devs behind it (or at least i hope). It's a sidenote comment, but there are also a lot of issues with Adobe and i really hope that open source projects like this, rapidraw or rawtherapee will accelerate the development in a good way of Adobe (fixing functionalities rather than adding ai slop features)

For sure, but if less people working on more apps will make things better? This was one small example you always have to be behind app by app this is the problem to maintain all this apps. But maybe I am wrong at all

I don't think we can rule out some reverse engineering, there are some really clever MCP's for AI models that can be used for this (One being REA - Reverse engineer anything) What this does as I understand it is look at the inputs and outputs of compiled code you point it at and generate psudo code of how you'd get the same outputs from those inputs. So it's possible some of that is going on as well as vibe coding features but that is just speculation on my part.

I'm encouraged by the speed at which they're pumping out releases and hope they don't lose steam as I think these could be a real alternative to expensive subscription models as well as support a wider range of operating systems than the original software.