Anyone who has ever winced while watching another monthly Adobe subscription leave their bank account has likely dreamed of a competent free rival.
Meet ArtCraft, an open-source clone suite offering LightCraft, PhotoCraft and FilmCraft as free substitutes for Lightroom, Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Built with AI coding tools and still in early alpha, the project comes with an honest warning from its developer: it isn’t yet in a state to replace existing software.
A hands-on trial on 13 October put that disclaimer to the test, running the software on a Windows PC with an Intel Core i7 and an Nvidia RTX 5070, using photos and footage shot on a Canon EOS R5. With a capable machine and ordinary camera files, the results paint a clear picture for anyone relying on creative software for a living.
The suite stretches beyond the three apps tested. ArtCraft’s initial lineup also includes equivalents for Illustrator, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat, all free to download for Windows, macOS and Linux with no account needed. The developer describes them as clean-room reimplementations, not copies of Adobe’s code.
LightCraft Falls Over At The Front Door
The trouble started before any actual editing even began.
LightCraft wouldn’t import Canon CR3 raw files straight from the camera, so the tester had to copy them to the computer first. It also lacks native camera and lens profiles, which means the camera-matched colour and lens corrections many photographers rely on in Lightroom are absent.
Once the files were in, the results stayed shaky. Sharpening looked harsh and left fuzzy artefacts even at 40%, and subject selection and the masking overlay were unreliable, with the subject mask looking more like a radial mask than an outline of the subject.
Object selection and AI denoising only came to life after the tester installed a separate model by hand, which isn’t how most people picture a one-click tool.
PhotoCraft Dresses Like Photoshop, Minus The Precision
PhotoCraft scored a point on file support, opening and saving PSD, TIFF, JPG and PNG files, though HEIC isn’t supported.
The tools themselves were where the facade began to crack. Automatic selection and masking were less accurate than Photoshop’s, and content-aware fill and spot healing were only just usable, which is faint praise for tools built to fix mistakes.
Filters had no preview, so the tester had to guess settings such as blur and grain and judge the result afterwards. Generative Fill and text-to-image features aren’t included either.
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FilmCraft Meets Real Footage And Blinks First
FilmCraft proved to be the most fragile link in the chain.
It couldn’t play 10-bit 4:2:2 footage in the test, so clips had to be converted before trimming could begin. 4K editing was very slow without optimised media, so the tester downsized the footage, and shadows showed artefacts. The app also can’t open or save Premiere’s .prproj project files.
It wasn’t a total loss. Once the footage was converted, basic trimming, cutting and transitions worked, and the tester could import LUTs and make simple colour adjustments.
Copying The Menus Is The Easy Part
The tester called ArtCraft impressive for its size and stage but too unstable and incomplete for professional work, and the bigger point is what it shows about AI-built software.
One developer using AI can now create lookalikes of an entire creative suite, menus and all, which would once have taken a sizeable team.
What the test shows is where that approach runs out. A familiar layout can be built quickly, but camera files, project files and colour formats are what working creatives depend on every day, and they’re the trickiest parts of any editing suite to copy.
This is hardly an isolated incident. Cloudflare recently shared that one of its engineers tasked AI with rebuilding a drop-in substitute for Next.js in under seven days. However, the resulting code has yet to face the reality of heavy production traffic.
If more AI-built lookalikes follow, compatibility will be what shows which of them can stand beside the paid software and which only look the part.
