[!NOTE]
ArtCraft is a community of artists from all walks of life. Digital, generative, music,
games — if you make things, you're one of us. Come say hi on Discord.
Edit like you mean it
LightCraft is a complete darkroom in a single native app. Every adjustment is non-destructive, so your originals
are never touched. Every slider renders through a scene-referred, wide-gamut, 32-bit float pipeline: highlights
roll off like film, shadows open up without halos, and colour stays clean from capture to export.
☀️ Light
Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, with edge-aware local tone mapping (a guided filter on
log-luminance). Pulling −100 Highlights recovers a blown sky without the grey halos you'd get from a naive curve.
🎨 Color
White balance by temperature and tint (Kelvin for raw, relative for JPEG) with presets, Auto and a
click-to-neutralise eyedropper. Vibrance that protects skin tones, Saturation, an 8-band Color Mixer
(hue / saturation / luminance) and 3-way Color Grading wheels with blending and balance. All of it is computed in
OkLCh, a modern perceptual colour space.
✨ Effects
Texture for fine detail, Clarity for mid-tone punch, Dehaze (dark-channel prior with guided refinement;
push it negative to add atmosphere), post-crop Vignette with highlight priority, roundness and feather, and
resolution-independent film Grain with size and roughness.
📈 Tone Curve
Parametric region curve with movable splits plus point curves for RGB, Red, Green and Blue. Curves are monotone by
construction, so you never get an accidental tone inversion.
Color grading, the cinematic way
Split-tone shadows, midtones and highlights independently with drag-anywhere colour wheels. Below, Dorothea Lange's
Migrant Mother gets a warm, print-like tone (highlights at 42°, shadows at 28°) in two drags.
Before & after
Press \ to toggle the Before view, Y for side by side, or Shift+Y for a
split view. Every image below is a real screenshot of LightCraft, captured automatically by an agent through the
control channel.
Masking that goes where you point
Paint with a Brush (size, feather, flow, density, erase), drop Linear and Radial Gradients with draggable
pins, or select by Luminance Range, Color Range, Sky, Subject and Background. Combine components
with Add / Subtract / Intersect, invert any of them, and dial in 17 local adjustments per mask (Temp, Tint,
Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Texture, Clarity, Dehaze, Hue, Saturation, Sharpness, Noise,
Moiré, Defringe), plus an overall Amount.
Desktop Object and Describe masks use SAM 3 for click-based and text-prompt selection, with a separately
installed model; see model setup and terms. Subject, Sky and Background selections still use
classical heuristics. Existing model-generated masks render and export without the model installed.
Presets, profiles & the Color Mixer
Forty-one hand-built presets ship in the box (Golden Hour, Teal & Orange, Faded Matte, Selenium Tone, Crisp
Landscape and more), each with an Amount slider from 0 to 200 %. Save your own from any group of settings, mark
favourites, and copy, paste or sync edits across a whole selection with exactly the groups you choose.
✂️ Crop, straighten & geometry
Free or locked aspect ratios (1:1, 4:5, 5:7, 2:3, 4:3, 16:9, 16:10, original), drag-to-rotate straightening that always
keeps the largest crop inside the image, thirds / grid / golden-ratio overlays, flips and 90° rotations, plus
manual Vertical, Horizontal, Rotate, Aspect, Scale and Offset transforms.
⚫️ Black & White
One click (V) to monochrome, with an 8-band B&W Mix that lets you darken skies or make foliage glow.
Then tone it with Color Grading for selenium, sepia or split-tone prints.
Organize everything
A library that stays out of your way: All Photos, Recently Added, Picks, By Date, Albums nested in
Folders, and Recently Deleted. Rate with 0–5, flag with P / X /
U, colour-label with 6–9. Search understands fields:
rating:>3 flag:pick iso:>800 camera:x2 date:2026-04 keyword:mountains person:"Jane Doe"; plain words also match
the people named on faces, and quotes keep several words together. Every view sorts by capture date,
import date, edit date, name, rating, size or at random (a stable shuffle; View → Sort → Reshuffle for a new one). The justified Photo Grid and Square Grid views are virtualized,
so they stay smooth whether you have forty photos or forty thousand.
The People view groups named faces, including names read from XMP; face boxes can be edited in the loupe.
On desktop, automatic detection and recognition use optional models installed through Settings → Faces; no weights are
bundled. See face models and setup.
Built for agents
Every menu item, slider, brush stroke, crop handle and keystroke in LightCraft is a command with a stable id and
JSON parameters. The UI, the keyboard, the CLI, a JSON-lines control channel and an MCP server all dispatch
through the same entry point. An agent can cull a shoot, develop it, mask a sky and export it, and see the result.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
