PhotoCraft

PhotoCraft is an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop, rebuilt in pure Rust — layers, masks, adjustment layers, type, vectors, brushes and real PSD files, with every feature drivable by agents.

Try the web build — deployed on my Atlas cluster

Source on GitHub

Highlights

  • Clean-room discipline: Photoshop studied for behaviour and look only — implemented from public specs (Adobe PSD spec, ICC, ISO 32000 blend modes) and observation; no Adobe code, shaders, profiles or assets.
  • The original as oracle: a corpus of real Photoshop-authored PSDs drives pixel-level render comparisons, so proprietary output becomes the test suite instead of the source.
  • Measured parity: cargo xtask parity walks Photoshop’s menu tree against the live command registry — currently 627 of 627 menu items live, with an honest roadmap admitting where behaviour still lags.
  • Rust only, never crash: no JavaScript, no webview shell; unsafe forbidden except one isolated pen-tablet crate; no unwrap/panic in non-test code — a malformed file yields an error, never a lost document.
  • Agent-first architecture: everything is a command (UI, CLI, control channel and MCP dispatch the same ids); JSON control protocol over loopback TCP with token auth; generated parity and performance scorecards.
  • Web build on the homelab: the same Rust compiled to WASM (trunk + wasm-bindgen), served by nginx, deployed through the Atlas GitOps pipeline — Gitea CI builds, promotes the tag into git, and Argo CD syncs.

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