Have you heard about LightCraft yet?

[Eduard]

If you haven't heard about this yet, software engineer Brandon Thomas has built and released an open-source, free alternative to Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, including versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom (not Classic), Acrobat, After Effects, and InDesign. The apps are available for Mac, Windows, and Linux at the ArtCraft website. I've played around a bit with LightCraft and it solid. Might be extremely useful on older machines that still have some life in them.

Interestingly, he has also created a related alternative to Microsoft Office which I'm very impressed with so far! From the website: "Image editing, vector illustration, video, photography, PDFs, motion graphics, page layout, interface design, word processing, audio, presentations, CAD and spreadsheets. Native, open-source apps from the ArtCraft team, built in Rust and free to use."

Here is a screenshot from LightCraft editing a RAW file:

 

[Clovishound]

How is the masking? The review I saw on it showed screen shots, and the subject detection was less than stellar. I'm not trying to trash the software, just wondering how well it does with an essential feature for most folks.

I also wonder if this will be able to stick around. The layout looks like a clone of LR, although the code is likely different. Adobe has lots and lots of lawyers.

I've thought about downloading it. I really like LR, but I have issues with it running slow with certain operations, even though I have a fairly capable machine, with a fair amount of memory.

 

[Eduard]

I haven’t tried the masking yet. I was mostly trying to see how it handled a RAW file, color profiles, and crop/alignment tools. I may play with it some more later this evening.

Wonder who will react first: Adobe or Microsoft?

 

[Woodyg3]

Yeah, and the videos I've seen on it seem to show it has a long ways to go. I'll gladly pay Adobe $120 a year for professionally coded and updated software.

I wonder, as well, how long until there is a cease and desist order and the threat of a very large suit. They are almost exactly copying the interface, it looks like.

 

[Woodyg3]

A point of view that makes a lot of sense to me:

 

[BF Hammer]

I watched the F-stoppers video. Looks to me like it needs some more time to bake. And Adobe's legal team needs time for the ink to dry on the cease and desist letter and send it with a courier.

And the open-source alternative to MS Office has been out there and working well for 20+ years. OpenOffice and the branch project Libre Office.

 

[BF Hammer]

I did wipe clean my old PC and gave it a clean Linux Mint install 2 weekends ago. May be a good trial platform to check out LightCraft and PhotoCraft. It's actually running more happy since I unburdened it from Windows 11, and all my usual photo apps are originally Linux projects, other than Studio NX. So it's there as a backup platform now and can be used for experimentation like this.

 

[hark]

A point of view that makes a lot of sense to me:

Just finished watching this. I'm locked into an Adobe subscription until next spring for Photoshop which is around $119 annually. Since I use Camera RAW and do my own organizing, I don't need Lightroom.

But this video brings up an interesting point ... if you install the ArtCraft software, what exactly can it access on your computer/Mac? The creator has a beef with Adobe which is why he created all these software clones. Is he being compensated for all his work?

In the past, I purchased the Affinity Suite before it was taken over by Canva (although I haven't yet delved into them). But my main interest is with Affinity Designer which is a takeoff on Illustrator. And Affinity Publisher was/is their take on Microsoft's Publisher which I think has now been terminated. Inkscape is also free software for graphics. And PhotoPea is web-based software for photo editing which is eerily similar to an older version of Photoshop.

No doubt the Software Wars will continue to escalate. It will be interesting to see what Adobe chooses to do in response to ArtCraft.

On a side note, when I was in physical therapy for rotator cuff surgery, one of the office staff reached out to a person because he wanted to learn video editing. Turns out his mentor worked on The Mandalorian. He was told Disney uses DaVinci Resolve for their video editing. So for those who are interested, there are other options out there instead of Adobe.

 

[BF Hammer]

After a false start installing the non-optimal way in Linux Mint, I used the Launcher app to just install PhotoCraft and LightCraft. It is a little slow, but keep in mind I am using a vintage 2011 PC and I reverted back to using the original HDD after removing the SSD I upgraded to 5 years ago.

I can say I am fumbling around because I never used Adobe products other than a lite version of Photoshop from 20 years ago. If I can figure out how to do a depth-merge it might have a home. Otherwise I can still do things well enough in RawTherapee and GIMP.

I tried a test run on a photo from August.

I also was unable to figure out the color adjusting. The engine should be brighter red, the gray is about right.

 

[Eduard]

A point of view that makes a lot of sense to me:

Really well considered. Thanks for the link!

I'm curious to see where this goes. Personally, I'm a big LrC / PS fan. The applications and workflow just work for me. Consistency matters.