Over the years, one of the most consistent questions I’ve gotten asked is about the tools I use. I’ve been lucky in that my professional life affords me access to commercial applications like Photoshop and After Effects. Which have been the backbone of most of my gallery.
But, I’ve always tried to keep my ear to the ground for alternatives. I’ve tried many myself over the years; to see what they were capable of and how their feature set stacked up against the Adobe tools. Without saying something rude about the efforts of smaller teams, especially those folks dedicating themselves to open-source tools, nothing has pulled me away from Adobe.
Until now.
This past week, I learned of a new open-source Photoshop alternative called PhotoCraft. The screenshots looked nearly identical to modern Photoshop and I soon found out why. The developer is in the process of completely reverse engineering the storied image editor. An incredible goal. Even more incredible is how close they already are to accomplishing it.
The app is familiar and the functionality works as expected. It opens and saves native photoshop files. It’s fast, very fast in fact. And, it’s a native application available on Windows, Mac and Linux. No web apps, no runtime environments. And it’s open source. Free for you, me and everyone we know and licensed for use in commercial projects.
So what’s the catch? It’s not finished yet. The GitHub status is ‘early alpha’ and the software behaves that way. I think nearly every command, tool and menu from Photoshop is represented in PhotoCraft but not all of them work as expected right now. Some tools, namely the ones relying on Adobe’s Firefly AI, are entirely absent. No big surprise there.
Still, I’ve spent a couple of hours in the app, doing the same kinds of editing I always do and I’ve had very few issues. Which is encouraging. Even more encouraging is how quickly the app is progressing. Since I first learned of PhotoCraft there have been four major updates. Each squashing bugs, fixing features and getting the app even more stable.
If the rate of advancement is constant, I believe it will be in stable, release condition in a few months time. Maybe by the end of this year. That’s just an educated guess but I’ve seen how far they’ve come in a week. I think it’s more likely than not.
Oh, and I forgot the best part. Photoshop is only one of the apps they are currently developing. The project’s goal is to create open source alternatives to nearly the entire Adobe Creative Suite: Illustrator, Premiere, InDesign, Acrobat and After Effects.
They’re also working on Microsoft Office, in case that tickles your fancy.
I don’t know how long all of that’s going to take. I’d say it’s a safe bet all those applications won’t be final-release ready until sometime next year. But that’s a small price to pay as far as I’m concerned. I’m willing to wait a little while longer if it means creatives on every major OS have access to a common, native, open source toolset to get their work done and share it with the rest of us. I guarantee you’ll be seeing new work from me courtesy of the ArtCraft suite. I hope I’ll see some from you too!
As always, your questions, comments and suggestions are welcome.