Have you tried the apps, or have any experience with Photoshop (complex photo or art or video projects)?
Just curious, because I've worked within design/film etc. for years.
I did open the PhotoCraft and loaded a few of my simpler layout projects. And literally nothing works.
Let's see:
1. Tried to select text, like the selector is off from the cursor.
2. Tried to edit text, takes like 3 seconds to drag the slider for size, nothing happens (text doesn't change size).
3. Absolutely everything is insanely laggy: selecting, switching, etc.
4. Can't seem to expand/collapse folders.
5. Everything shows shortcut keys - shortcut keys don't do anything.
6. Tried to move something, it kind of got frozen for a while. Eventually disappeared I think?
7. Clicked something and it auto selected a side panel (don't know why), hid the other panel, can't stretch, collapse the panels or get it back...
This is actual joke software, I'm confused why you are impressed?
This is the thing. Anyone can one shot an app and accept what Claude does. But to go over every single feature where it gets it wrong, and actually get it to do the correct thing, over all of those tiny details in the program - that’s where the 3 days turns into a year and maybe 3.
There’s a major difference between a polished UI and a polished program.
The fact that a model can get this far is still impressive, and it will probably one shot the program properly in < 3 years.
Maybe it's been updated since his post, but I experience none of these issues in my testing.
Really? I got the 0.7.0 version today and loaded a couple of my projects and tried using it in my normal day-to-day workflow.
1. Can't use brushes because they are slow and render jaggy polygons instead of the beautiful perfectly smooth brushes of Photoshop - literally can't draw a hand-print looking sketch circle as it looks like a weird digital polygon.
2. I use masks for texturing vector layers, literally cannot ctrl+click to select anything in my file because the texture clipped inside of the layer blocks lower layer selection even though it's completley clipped out of view. Makes it impossible to work on my files without going over to the layers and scrolling hundreds of layers and expanding folders to try to find it. This means I can't use it at all.
3. Try to do dumb little things like turn on one of my color modifying layers and it takes 2 seconds to sit there and wait until it activates instead of a few milliseconds like photoshop.
4. Can't activate my fx layer even though it shows that it IS activated and then others show not activated or something... something completely wrong about this, not even sure what.
5. tried to adjust one of my vector layers couldn't hold alt+hover to adjust the point handles.
6. Trying to type text, takes like 1second per character just to type (photoshop is instant).
7. Can't drag UI sections like Navigator/etc. over to the other panels and can't collapse/uncollapse panels.
8. Can't fill/edit the vector path drawing tool at all I don't think, maybe the UI is just weird but definitely a UX issue or just unusable? Not sure...
I'm not going to bother trying more things, but literally every single thing I tested had a bug or is janky to where it's unusable in a professional context.
I do see 100s of people are working on it now with 10s of thousands of stars on github and it does seem a hair better than my first test, so I'll keep watching the progress, but so far it's just too buggy/glitchy/missing features to work with for me (I have a pretty decent Windows pc - nvida rtx 4080 card, 128gb ram, etc).
Not surprised, I was super suspicious when I saw this post. Like I bet the underlying image/layout manipulation isn’t that technically challenging at this point, but there is just so much that goes into every single operation from the UI to validations to operation that even with the best use of AI I doubt you could replicate any of the image/video products without several months to a years worth of dedicated effort.
Yes, I would have believed it more if they were targeting one app. But doing all seven at once immediately made me think they likely had no level of care at all (or a giant team?). Today's AI can be impressive but it's not up to adobe-scale apps without a lot of attention and feedback, if you have standards at all. There's a huge surface area to polish in just one of these apps.
I checked GitHub and it has only two committers and four weeks effort: One person +550k lines, another +3k lines.
As many companies, we've started to use AI on a daily-basis. Yet, it didn't cut the need for testing (both automated and manual) and reviewing.
Now here we see a fully blown suite which is already alarming for basic testability.
Also, we had several apps targeting directly at Adobe in the past.
* Blackmagic DaVinci is the biggest, and it also bought several companies to start fusing a one-stop solution.
* Affinity also started with single app that got attention before being swallowed into Canva.
Leaving compatibility and ui-workflow (which is important to existing users), It's much more sane to start and focus on a single app instead of a fully blown package.
From Adobe/Creative Cloud users, I do know Acrobat Pro is one of the problematic apps they have in terms (it freezes, guess a lot of legacy code, etc). And yet, even where there is some competition on PDF editors, Acrobat is still strong also due to UX and features.
I don't think manually QA testing a Photoshop clone is realistic for a single person.
This would either need to become a community effort, or rely on AI's computer use and vision capabilities to align the behavior to the Adobe reference software.
In any case, it's very interesting, and I'm curious if this can become good enough for professional use.
Yeah. It’s expected from a vibe coding project, especially if they care more about the optics than functionality.
I heard from another Photoshop clone that they spent almost a year to polish the software, using AI nonetheless. The hardest part they told me is the getting the color management part right.
That for one app. A full suit with a “written in Rust” tag sounds today almost like a clickbait.
Which clone? Photon? It's not open source, why are creative apps often not open source, unlike other kinds of apps?
Open source is strong in developer tools and where it is complimentary to some other product.
Creative apps don’t fit in either of those categories.
Everyone knows there's a big group of people willing to pay through the nose for good ones so nobody wants to give them away?
Not many people like to work for free
I didn't even bother downloading any of it to try it out - this is kind of what I expected. Maybe after a massive amount of token spend it'll be somewhat functional?
I did build and run it today and it was functional and without performance issues.
This was on a fresh DNG, not some big existing project.
Perhaps with massive amount of spend it can be brought up to parity to work even for complex Photoshop projects.
I loaded my smallest professional project today with fairly simple shapes and text and a minimal number of large smart objects with few effects (essentially 1 page of an educational web system design).
It's not as bad as a few days ago, however it's extremely slow and lots of little bugs to the point I would never use it professionally. Weird things too, like my entire mouse pointer is slow, drawing with a brush is slow and jaggy, editing a vector and the points don't highlight properly or ending the edit and suddenly it randomly moved somewhere on the screen. Just very clunky, bad feeling and not really usable compared to photoshop.
I'll keep an eye on it out of curiosity, but right now it's unusable in a professional context.
Not experiencing any of these issues today testing with some of my projects. Main issue I see is I'm unable to import Actions.
In the AI era nobody has time to use software, they just ask AI to evaluate the app that AI built…
A house of mirrors.
The author has said this is very early stage and from what I can see this has only existed for a week
three days ago he said he one-shotted the entirety of photoshop. he's been promoting this all over reddit. seems odd to then say it's "very early stage"
PDFCraft is awesome. Haven't seen any bugs on it and the updates are still coming.
You expected version 0.2.0 to be perfect?
The fact that this does everything it does is super impressive.