I replaced the Adobe suite with a free open source alternative that Claude can control directly

For something as popular as it is, nobody actually likes paying for Adobe products. As a photography enthusiast, I'm married to Lightroom because it's the software that I'm used to, but with every successive update, the app keeps getting more and more bloated and error-prone. I'm also not a fan of the app's subscription, cloud-focussed approach. But things just got interesting.

Someone's gone out and cloned all of Adobe's apps, including Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and more, ported them to blistering-fast Rust, and released them for free. Dubbed Artcraft, the collection of apps includes tools like Lightcraft, a Lightroom alternative, Photocraft, a Photoshop alternative, and many more. Surely, these couldn't be as capable as the original apps? There's only one way to find out. I put them to the test.

Lightcraft gets most of what makes Lightroom great, right

Familiar editing tools, AI-powered masking, and a few RAW processing quirks

Of all the apps, Lightcraft was the one I was most interested in, as Lightroom tends to be my most-used tool. It's even got MCP support, so I can connect it to Claude and let an AI agent work directly with my photo library. We'll come to that in a minute. Let's start at the beginning.

Lightcraft and the entire suite of apps are available as native packages for practically every platform, including macOS, Windows, and Linux. In some cases, a browser version is also available. The apps largely have 1:1 feature parity, though some are further along than others. And just like Lightroom, you can browse collections, select an image, adjust its appearance via non-destructive edits, and export the results without modifying the original file.

Now, an open-source photo editor in itself isn't such a big deal. From Gimp to Photopea, there are plenty of options there. The real differentiation here is that the app not only looks and feels exactly like Lightroom but also has every single feature integrated and supports the exact same keyboard shortcuts. It's what allowed me to continue my workflow exactly as it is in Lightroom Classic the moment I opened the app.

That said, as I mentioned earlier, the apps are still in a state of development, and some features aren't fully integrated just yet. I noticed this most in camera compatibility and color rendering. While Lightcraft had no trouble reading DNG files from my Sony A7iii camera, the results weren't quite the same when I pulled up photos from an old Panasonic camera.

That RAW compatibility gap continues to color rendering. Every photo editing app interprets RAW images a bit differently. Adobe's RAW interpretation is popular enough that it is widely considered the default. Similarly, tools like Capture One use their own pipeline to interpret RAW images. Lightcraft might be modeled after Lightroom, but there's a very stark difference in how it interprets RAW images, and if you use presets to one-click manipulate your images, you'll need to spend some more time tweaking them to get them to a point that you're happy with.

Similarly, tools like AI-powered masking are implemented a bit differently, which makes sense since, despite being a clone, the tool obviously doesn't have access to Adobe's AI-powered cloud servers. Instead, Lightcraft nudges you to download SAM 3, which is Meta's image segmentation model, to implement on-device AI-powered features. Not only can it handle standard object detection-based masking, but it will also let you use plain text to define bounding boxes. It's pretty cool.

While Lightroom is where I spent most of my time, the Photoshop alternative is similarly impressive in its ability to copy Adobe's workflow. I'm no artist, so I can't confirm if all the most advanced workflows will get covered here. Simpler tasks like making layers, adding text, or overlays work perfectly fine. From that point of view, the software is already a great alternative to the likes of Photopea, while being local and extremely fast.

Artcraft's MCP integration could change how you edit videos, but it isn't quite there yet

This AI-powered Adobe alternative is already impressive, and it's just getting started

The other aspect of the software that I wanted to check out was MCP support. If you're not aware, MCP(Model Context Protocol) is a standard that lets AI apps like Claudecommunicate with external tools. Built-in MCP support across the portfolio means that I can technically ask Claude to make all the changes I need to make and let it figure out the right settings.

Of all the apps, Artcraft's Premiere Pro equivalent is best placed to benefit from it. Think cutting timelines with one command or color grading video. Unfortunately, in my testing, that's the app that is most underbaked at the moment. I dropped in some LOG footage and experienced plenty of lag in the timeline, broken audio, and more.

Broadly speaking, Artcraft's goal is to release a fully realized Adobe suite-equivalent set of apps over the next month or two. But from what I can see, things might take just a bit longer than that. However, that's not really the point. What blew my mind was the fact that someone was able to recreate decades of work within days and create a product that isn't just a minimum viable piece of software but something that genuinely works. Not just that, in many scenarios, it is faster than Adobe's software.

Artcraft isn't ready to replace Adobe just yet, but I'm excited to see where it goes

Having spent some time with the Artcraft app suite, I might stick around with Lightroom for a bit more, but it's very clear that the app will achieve full feature parity and capability soon. I've seen the pace of development of tools like Gimp, and watching an AI-developed tool just steamroll ahead has been an interesting experience, to say the least. Make of that what you will.

The suite still needs time to mature, but for a project that aims to replicate decades of software development, the progress has been remarkable. What we have already is plenty good, but I'm looking forward to checking back in a month to see if that MCP integration is able to expedite my video editing workflow. Adobe won't lose my subscription immediately, but for the first time in a while, I'm excited to see vibe coding deliver something astonishingly good, and to see where this open-source Adobe alternative goes.