Brandon Thomas releases open-source Adobe Creative Cloud alternative

Thomas built and released ArtCraft as a free, open-source alternative to Adobe Creative Cloud.[2] The suite includes alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom (but not Lightroom Classic), Acrobat, After Effects and InDesign.[2] Thomas says he used Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 AI model to recreate the seven applications in Rust.[2] He founded ArtCraft nearly a year before the report; he had previously been CEO of Storyteller.ai and a software engineer at Square.[2] That background provides context for the project, but the available evidence does not describe the size of its development team or how the applications were built beyond Thomas’s account of using the model.

PetaPixel reports that ArtCraft’s applications are available for macOS, Windows and Linux.[2] Phoronix reports binaries for Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Windows, and says the applications debuted the prior week and had already received multiple new releases.[3] The two reports differ on whether FreeBSD is included, so teams evaluating a particular operating system should verify availability for that system rather than assume the lists are identical. Early users have reported problems with the applications.[4] The evidence does not specify which functions are affected or how widespread those issues are.

Thomas said he wanted to give artists free, open-source tools without Adobe subscriptions.[2] He also said Adobe had charged him cancellation fees on multiple occasions and that he had hated the company since.[2] His post about ArtCraft did not last long.[2] Separately, a GitHub repository describes PhotoCraft as a clean-room Photoshop reimplementation in pure Rust.[5] PhotoCraft says it can open, edit and save layered Photoshop documents; it reports that resaving preserves the rendering of 307 of 309 files in the psd-tools test set.[5] Those are PhotoCraft’s claims about its test set, not a reported suite-wide compatibility result.