PhotoCraft

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Features

Every screenshot here is the real app at work on public-domain art, rendered offscreen through its control channel.

Everything in the box

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.

• Faithful round trips: opening and re-saving a document renders the same for 307 of the 309 files in the psd-tools test set and 169 of 170 in our mixed ag-psd/psd-tools set (crates/io/tests/it/corpus.rs; fetch the psd-tools set with cargo xtask corpus --psd-tools), and anything we don't model yet (raw blocks, descriptors, extras) is carried over instead of being dropped. A re-saved file is not byte-identical to its source: PhotoCraft rewrites image resources, layer records and the composite. Only the standalone craft-psd crate, parsing and writing a file without the document model, reproduces every parseable corpus file byte for byte (crates/psd/tests/it/corpus.rs).
• 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

# Every subcommand explains itself
photocraft-cli batch --help

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

The desktop app also offers an authenticated, loopback-only 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 1,700 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

Japanese fonts for the UI and Type tool come from craft-fonts, an optional build input (desktop release builds always include it). Without it PhotoCraft uses your system's CJK fonts:

git clone https://github.com/storytold/craft-fonts ../craft-fonts
CRAFT_FONTS_DIR="$PWD/../craft-fonts" cargo run --release -p photocraft

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

Installers for macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the web are attached to each GitHub release. On Linux you can pick an AppImage, a .deb, an .rpm, a tarball or a Flatpak bundle. The bundle needs the freedesktop runtime from Flathub, which flatpak offers to install along with it:

flatpak install --user photocraft-<version>-linux-x86_64.flatpak   # or -linux-aarch64
flatpak run ai.storyteller.photocraft

The Flatpak prints through the host's CUPS socket (File › Print talks IPP to it directly, no lp needed); without CUPS, or without a printer, File › Print opens the system print dialog through the print portal. See printing.

The AppImage needs no install: the first run registers its launcher icon and menu entry in ~/.local/share so the dock shows PhotoCraft's icon on Wayland. Set PHOTOCRAFT_NO_DESKTOP_INTEGRATION=1 to skip that, and see docs/releasing.md › Linux to undo it.

To use the bundled CLI, run ./photocraft-<version>-linux-x86_64.AppImage --cli --help, or --cli mcp to start the MCP server on stdio. CLI launches skip desktop integration. A symlink named photocraft-cli also selects the CLI; see docs/development.md.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗