"story told by photo craft"
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2026
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We already HAVE open source Photoshop clones. Quite a lot of them, actually. Have had them for decades.
There's two types of people who use Photoshop. A: the ones who pay for it because they WANT to, because it gets them things like enterprise support. B: pirates who don't give a shit about all the valid open source alternatives that ALREADY exist. Neither are going to start using this, even if it WASN'T defective slop.
My review after like 5 min of testing:
It has the basic things imemented and they seem to work. At least I couldn't break them with basic usage. The performance has a weird bug. The proformance gets progressivly worse the more projects I open. But only the new projects have terrible performance. The first one still works normal.
It has only the most basic features implemented. Like things you could do on Krita as well, only that Krita can do more.
The ui has some oddities: on the top left there is a button with the current tool you are using and a chevron (idk what it is called) indicating a dropdown. Both do nothing. Or at least I couldn't figure out what they do or when they become active.
If you disable the ui elements on the right side it will still show their toolbar. The toolbar also remains active. This is a bug as switching modes removes them. if you enable and disable one then it is there again.
I cant rightclick on the empty space in the layers tab. Idk if that is a feature in PS, but I instinctively did it so there is some muscle memory there.
tldr: I kinda works. Very basic tho.
The settings are just as hidden here as they are in PS. So good job on that one?
how can you describe it as a clean room implementation when it was made with LLMs?
jfc is that a thing now, people just ignoring the enormous theft that's wrapped up in LLMs and calling it clean?
I despise adobe, and considering their pivot to ai slop this is ironic - but not something I'd ever install.
jfc is that a thing now, people just ignoring the enormous theft that’s wrapped up in LLMs and calling it clean?
It really is a thing. Far too many conversations lead to the moronic “no no it's cool, I heard in the USA they say it can't be copyrighted”, as though that addresses the concern at all.
I'm here for the end of copyright, but if someone believes copyright will be just poofed out of existence because an LLM washed the code? They are not paying attention to how many lawyer hours these corporations are willing to drop on your head for daring to challenge their monopoly.
fucking wild.
yeah, I'd love to see the end of copyright too, but not in the 'this kills the artists' but feeds the fucking shitty ai music algos barf baaaaaaaaaaarfff
My opinion: this is pointless
LLMs are stochastic regurgitators, but software can already be copy/pasted without cost.
Why should we be interested in an LLM clone of photoshop when there are already clones of photoshop (e.g. https://photopea.com/)?
If I want to use photoshop (or something like it), then I'll use photoshop (or something like it: i.e. photopea).
There's literally no point in favour of using the LLM copy, it's going to have less support and less security (since its training data will have also included prompt injection attacks).
It's just more of the same, but worse. Even for the sake of argument: if it wasn't worse, it'd still be more of the same.
I'm not interested in more of the same, I'm interested in things made by people that push the boundaries of what's possible: (e.g. graphite).
AI slop that’s been developed in a mere 4 days (?)
I have been working on a project, with AI, for 4 months. When I see something done in 4 days that is supposed to be a large package, even more complex than what I am working on, I tend to be very wary about the quality.
I wonder though if they just told agents to literally reverse engineer Photoshop. As in, they were given access to Photoshop and able to interact with the UI and figure out every minute behavior. With a good testing strategy, I could see agents producing a decent quality product. That's basically strip mining years of effort put in by humans.
In the project I am working on I use 5 LLM models
- 3 evaluate a task
- 1 implements task
- 1 checks the work and send back to the implementer
What I have found is that anything done with a single family of models is going to be, in my opinion, far less quality than something done with at least a second family of models checking the work. In this particular case it also sounds like there was very little human oversight. Even it works, it likely will have lots of decisions which will come back to haunt the developer, or the users of the software.
There's enough photoshop clones (e.g. photopea) and tutorials written out there that the LLMs would have been trained on.
There's no actual need for an agent to have any interaction with photoshop itself.
People on Reddit reportedly tried it and it doesn't work properly it seems
Whatever kills Adobe...
We're still looking. This ain't it.
At a minumum it terrifies monopolies like Adobe.
Time for Adobe to start telling everyone that open source isn't safe from hacking, but their closed source is scanned multiple times a day for vulnerabilities.
i hate adobe, but also color science is hard. Can we say whether this would affect the actual color values recorded on sensors or film, even in subtle ways? what if the color matters for historical or scientific or medical purposes?
No idea how this works, sounds insane
I would personally prefer getting the few extra additions like automatic object detection into GIMP, or better PDF editing support for Libreoffice draw etc and use that
Cool, now do Lightroom too.
They did, but they are all buggy garbage. Darktable ftw.
This kind of feels like Nintendo vs. Pocketpair all over again... It's a "written from scratch" situation so Adobe might struggle to get them there but they also have a ton of patents covering every inch of their catalogue. I think this one is going to get really messy because unlike Nintendo this is potentially existential for Adobe.