What it is
Pixelwright is a fork of PhotoCraft v0.5.0, an early-alpha, clean-room, Rust-only layered image editor by the ArtCraft team and contributors. It keeps their engine (a pure-data document model, a command registry that every action goes through, a CPU reference compositor and a wgpu one) and builds on it: bugs found and fixed, stale roadmap rows corrected, and a set of new features listed below.
Three programs come out of this repository:
| Program | What it is |
|---|
Pixelwright (pixelwright) | The native desktop editor (egui on wgpu) for Windows, macOS and Linux |
Pixelwright CLI (pixelwright-cli) | Headless: convert, inspect, run commands, batch, droplets, palette, diff, and an MCP server |
Pixelwright Web (pixelwright-web) | The same editor compiled to WebAssembly (trunk + wasm-bindgen), running in any modern browser |
Try it now
The live preview is the real program compiled to WebAssembly, running entirely in your browser tab:
https://www.jonmcgee.online/apps/pixelwright/. It needs WebGPU or WebGL2, downloads about 9 MB (22 MB unpacked) once, and starts with a few public-domain images you can open from the start screen (or drop in your own files, including PSDs; nothing is uploaded anywhere).
Download for Windows
Windows (64-bit): download Pixelwright-windows-x64.zip (or the latest release page), unzip it and run Pixelwright.exe. There is no installer. The file is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen will say it protected your PC: choose More info, then Run anyway, or build it yourself from source. SHA-256 checksums are on the release. It needs a graphics card with DirectX 12 or Vulkan; without one, use the browser build at https://www.jonmcgee.online/apps/pixelwright/.
What you get
What's new in this fork
First fixes and finished features from the roadmap, then additions of my own. Everything below is a registered command, so it appears in the menus and the command palette (⌘/Ctrl+K) and works from the CLI and MCP. Each has tests; the translation tables cover all 12 translated UI languages.
| Feature | Where | What it does |
|---|
| Frequency Separation… | Layer › New · layer.frequencySeparation | Splits a pixel layer into a blurred low layer and a Linear Light high layer inside a group, the standard non-destructive retouching setup. The two stack back to the original exactly (tested at 8, 16 and 32 bits); the original is hidden, not removed. |
| Dodge & Burn Layer | Layer › New · layer.newDodgeBurn | A 50 % grey Overlay (or Soft Light) layer to paint light and shadow onto without touching pixels. |
| Orton Glow… | Layer › New · layer.ortonGlow | A blurred copy in Screen mode; its opacity is the amount, so the glow stays adjustable. |
| Straighten Horizon | Image › Image Rotation · image.autoStraighten | Measures the dominant near-horizontal or near-vertical edge direction from the composite and levels the image (rotate and crop, one undo step). "apply": false only measures. On Ansel Adams' Tetons tilted by a known 4° it measures −3.98° and restores the picture; on the level photo it refuses (confidence 0.05). |
| Colour-blindness proofing | View › Proof Setup | Adds Tritanopia (blue-yellow, Machado et al. 2009) and Achromatopsia (luminance only) to the protanopia and deuteranopia simulations. |
| Open and Save start where you left off | desktop | File › Open and Save As remember the last folder, across restarts. |
| Recent commands in the palette | ⌘/Ctrl+K | An empty query lists what you ran last, newest first. |
Open .pcraft | desktop, web, CLI | PhotoCraft's native bundles open as they are; saving writes .pxwr. |
?open= and samples | web | …/index.html?open=samples/tetons.jpg opens an image at startup (same-origin paths only); the start screen offers four public-domain samples. |
pixelwright-cli palette | CLI | The dominant colours of any image or document: , , . |
Fixes and corrections: the synthetic CMYK ICC profile, the example plug-in and the tests that the rename touched; two scorecard rows (Smudge fringe, Sample All Layers) that were stale were verified against the code and its tests and corrected; a clippy-clean, never-panic code base is kept (panic_hunt fuzzes the new commands too). The full list is in docs/fork-changes.md.
Honest status
Pixelwright is early alpha, and so is what it was forked from. Much of Photoshop's feature surface exists in some form, but it is not yet a replacement for daily professional work. In the upstream roadmap's own assessment:
- Solid: layered editing, masks, adjustment layers, the colour-managed canvas, PSD round trips within the test corpus, the brush engine, the CLI and MCP.
- Rough: many interaction details (the scorecard counts 57 of 135 preferences that nothing reads), 22 of 38 performance budgets missed on the upstream baseline machine, a documented GPU-compositor crash with a 150-layer document, complex layout PSDs that feel laggy.
- Missing: AI and generative features (none), about twenty tools (Pen variants, Rotate View, Perspective Crop and others), type on a path, SVG and PDF import, scripting compatibility with Photoshop actions, and the plug-in ecosystem (plug-ins here are sandboxed WebAssembly).
docs/scorecard.md has the measured numbers; docs/parity.md counts menu wiring only, which is not behaviour.
Get started
You need Rust 1.95 or newer. On Linux: libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev libx11-dev libxrandr-dev libxi-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libgtk-3-dev.
git clone https://github.com/game7ballJT/pixelwright
cd pixelwright
cargo run --release -p pixelwright -- image.psd # the desktop app
cargo test --workspace # the test suite (several thousand tests)
The browser build (needs trunk and rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown):
cd apps/pixelwright-web
trunk build --release # writes ../../dist/web: index.html, the wasm-bindgen glue, the .wasm and samples/
trunk serve --release # dev server on http://127.0.0.1:8765
Command line
# Headless: open, edit, save
pixelwright-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
pixelwright-cli palette wave.psd --count 6 --format hex # the six dominant colours
pixelwright-cli diff before.png after.png --out heat.png --fail # compare, with a heat-map
pixelwright-cli batch --actions grade.json --in ./raw --out ./graded
pixelwright-cli commands --filter blur # the command registry
pixelwright-cli mcp # serve MCP on stdio for an agent
The desktop app also offers an authenticated, loopback-only control channel (pixelwright --control 7878) for inspecting UI state, driving tools with pointer events and taking offscreen screenshots; see docs/control-protocol.md.
Where things are
crates/
geom cms color raster foundation: geometry, ICC colour, pixel formats and blend maths, copy-on-write tiles
psd codecs raw heif tablet standalone format crates (PSD/PSB, ACO/ASE, image codecs, camera RAW, HEIC, pen input)
doc ops algo paint text vector document model, history, imaging algorithms, brush engine, type, paths
compose gpu format io plugins compositors (CPU oracle, wgpu), native format, import/export, WebAssembly plug-ins
engine Session + the command registry: every action is a command
ui-egui automation the egui shell (thin) and the MCP server
apps/ pixelwright pixelwright-cli pixelwright-web
Layering is enforced by cargo xtask layers; the engine never sees the UI toolkit. New contributors and AI agents: read AGENTS.md, then docs/. The long-form documentation is in book/.
The family
Pixelwright is one of a growing family of forks of the ArtCraft Team's creative apps. Each has its own repository and a live preview in the browser:
Credits and license
Pixelwright is a modified fork of PhotoCraft v0.5.0, copyright (c) 2026 the ArtCraft Team and the PhotoCraft contributors, whose work this repository builds on and whose history it preserves. All of it, and the changes made here, are available under the same terms: MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option. This fork is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the upstream authors; it carries none of their branding, as their brand license requires of forks. Required notices are in NOTICE.
Bundled fonts, icons, images and other assets keep their own open licenses; each one is listed with its author, source and license in ATTRIBUTION.md. Every artwork shown (and the four web samples) is in the public domain; sources are in docs/images/SOURCES.md. The app icon is original work made for this project.
Adobe, Photoshop and other product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of Adobe Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Pixelwright is an independent open-source project, is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Adobe Inc., and uses these names only to describe the file formats and workflows it is compatible with.
