An open-source project called PhotoCraft is building a clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in Rust, with native support for macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the web through WebAssembly, according to the project's GitHub repository.
The project has drawn more than 38,000 stars and includes about 53 tools, 16 types of adjustment layers, layer styles, vector shape tools, smart objects and PSD file support, with GPU-accelerated compositing through wgpu, the repository says. It is released under a dual MIT and Apache-2.0 license.
PhotoCraft's own documentation describes the project as early alpha, saying "much of Photoshop's feature surface exists in some form, but it is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work." The project is missing AI and generative features, about 20 tools, and deeper typography and plugin support, according to the repository.
A clean-room Rust rebuild of Photoshop's feature set with real PSD support is a serious undertaking, not a toy clone, and the team's own alpha label is worth taking at face value before anyone routes production work through it.