His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.
Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.
As someone who has worked within the Adobe suite for a long time, I'm almost constantly looking for alternatives, and that has nothing to do with the quality of the first-party apps themselves. They're excellent to work in and provide a professional workflow that I'm used to, but paying monthly for a piece of software has never sat right with me. I have consistently gone back and forth, canceling and renewing my subscription because the alternatives I find just don't cut it, but that cycle seems to have mercifully come to an end.
When developer Brandon Thomas released ArtCraft's "crafting apps," they immediately caught my attention. It’s a set of seven open-source apps modeled on Adobe’s flagship programs, built in Rust with Claude Opus 5.5. The UI is a spitting image, the feature parity is most of the way there for a weekend creative like me, and it's free with no subscription required. It has some rough edges and missing features, but for a project that's not even two months old, it's way better than it has any right to be.
It feels like the Adobe suite to use
The apps have virtually all of the same menus and workflows
I'm someone who is essentially totally self-taught on the Adobe platform, having started with Premiere Pro to edit sick gaming montages when I was quite young, and found Photoshop and Lightroom later. I'm not a professional, but I know my way around these apps well.
Upon first launch of FilmCraft, the Premiere Pro equivalent, it opens to a sample project with some clips and a pre-built sequence, but I was more interested in how it would handle 4K gameplay capture. I treated it exactly as I would Premiere, importing the footage, cutting it with all of the same keybinds I usually use in the Editing workspace, and it's 1:1 here.
This will be a theme, but it's incredibly impressive how well recreated some of the UI is. I moved on to adding some effects to the gameplay, starting with a "Damaged VHS" effect on one of the clips, and for a canned effect, it looks pretty good. I then tested some key-framing with a crop, and besides some of the colors in the UI being different, I can't tell the difference between this and Premiere. Exporting is the same, and most of the settings you'd expect to be there are present, complete with hardware acceleration.
PhotoCraft was the next thing I tested, and because Photoshop is what I use most for daily work, my expectations are quite high. Some of the work I do requires passing around .psd files, and being able to open those natively is a non-negotiable. PhotoCraft opens all of the templates I use for work instantly, and does so with zero fuss. Good start.
I moved into working with a standard template I use most frequently that consists of multiple layers, and everything is exactly where it should be. Adjustment layers, masks, layer styles, and type all exist. Actions are there too, though PhotoCraft doesn’t include Photoshop’s prebuilt set, so you record your own.
LightCraft is the Lightroom equivalent, and it's modeled on the cloud-based Lightroom rather than Lightroom Classic. Compared to the other Lightroom alternatives I've used like darktable and Affinity, LightCraft is already just as good for what I do, which is quick edits on photos that I want to use for publication. It can't use Adobe's servers for some of the AI features like denoising, but it does provide a way to upload your own model that runs locally on your own hardware. I haven't tested this myself, but if it works even half as well as the Adobe offering, I can see myself swapping over the LightCraft full-time.
It solves the Adobe problem on Linux
It's far more usable than the usual Linux alternatives
I'm the first person that will go to bat for FOSS software, but if we're being honest with ourselves, stuff like GIMP and kdenlive is not a suitable replacement for the kind of workspace that Adobe offers. Professionals simply cannot choose Linux as their sole operating system if they rely on Adobe software, so they've historically been stuck dual-booting Windows or using a Mac. Dragging Adobe software kicking and screaming through Wine was not a fun experience personally, but I can acknowledge that good work is being done there.
Thankfully, though, I think ArtCraft is the first signal that we might not need to force the round peg through the square hole much longer.
Every ArtCraft app ships with a native Linux build, and that, to me, is the biggest selling point of all. Using these apps on Windows was great, but it's able to solve the OS exclusivity problem that creatives have had, and that's huge.
True pros are going to find holes
It's not 100% 1:1 with Adobe just yet
The ArtCraft project is pretty clear about its gaps, and some of them are going to be deal-breakers for those who use creative software for paid work. By its own count, PhotoCraft has 56 of Photoshop’s 68 tools. It’s slower than Photoshop at almost everything the team has timed, and it doesn’t support Photoshop plugins. Most importantly for anyone with clients, the PSDs it saves aren’t yet reliably accepted by Photoshop.
LightCraft’s own numbers tell a similar story. By feature count it claims about 81% of Lightroom. As a day-to-day replacement, the project puts it nearer 61% overall and around 51% for a typical working photographer. RAW handling is definitely the weak spot. The project says LightCraft can decode 83% of the 1,446 camera models Adobe supports, but has verified only 38% of them. It works best for JPEG and DNG shooters on one machine and for most Sony, Panasonic, Fujifilm, Nikon, and older Canon RAW files. Plug-in and ecosystem support sits around 15%. For my Canon EOS REBEL T3i, it imported everything just fine, but your mileage will certainly vary.
FilmCraft's roadmap is pretty similar, with its feature checklist covering 87% of Premiere, but the team's own estimate of readiness for real work is 50 to 60%. The theme is the same here: plugin support is the real gap for pros, being unable to work with VST3 or Audio Units plugins, and it doesn’t support third-party OpenFX video effects. Lumetri, keys, masks, and export rendering still run on the CPU as well, which isn't good for anyone doing professional work.
There’s also the question of whether ArtCraft will be around long enough to rely on. Thomas calls the apps clean-room reimplementations built from public specs and observed behavior, but having been built with Opus 5.5, some critics call that into question. There's also the issue of copying Adobe's interface this closely, raising some questions about trade dress, and while Adobe hasn't made any comment at the time of writing, they could have a case for breach of contract of their General Terms of Use at the very least, as it bars reverse engineering specifically.
For an alpha, the ArtCraft suite is incredibly impressive
If you're a professional that requires compatibility with a specific set of third-party plugins and hardware acceleration, I wouldn't cancel your Creative Cloud subscription just yet. If you’re a hobbyist or a working creative whose jobs mostly involve retouching, layout tweaks, editing some quick video or culling a shoot, ditching Adobe for these ArtCraft apps is probably safe. It costs nothing to download these apps and take them for a spin, and if it keeps progressing at this rate, the result might be the ultimate FOSS creative suite.