Photoshop, rebuilt from scratch and free

A proper Photoshop alternative just showed up

There's a new image editor called PhotoCraft that does almost everything Adobe Photoshop does — layers, masks, brushes, the works — and it's completely free. No subscription. No Adobe account. No catch you'll find in the fine print.

It opened to the public just a few days ago and tens of thousands of people noticed immediately.

What makes it genuinely interesting isn't just the price. Photoshop has always been a closed room — Adobe decides what it does, how much it costs, and whether it runs on your machine. PhotoCraft is built in the open, by anyone who wants to contribute, and it's designed to run natively on Mac, Windows, Linux, and even inside a browser tab without installing anything.

Here's the part that caught our eye at AC0: it can be controlled by an AI agent. That means a piece of software could, in theory, open an image, apply edits, export files, and hand them off — all without a human touching Photoshop's confusing toolbar. For a design studio, a marketing team, or anyone who processes a lot of images, that changes what's possible.

It's early. It doesn't have every Photoshop feature yet. But it opens 307 out of 309 Photoshop files correctly, which is a remarkable result for something this new.

Words worth knowing

Open-source — Software whose inner workings are public. Anyone can inspect it, improve it, or build on it. The opposite of a black box.

PSD file — The file format Photoshop uses to save projects with layers intact. Being able to open these means PhotoCraft speaks Photoshop's language.

AI agent — A piece of software that can carry out tasks on its own — clicking, editing, exporting — the way a person would, but automatically.

MIT/Apache license — Legal permission to use software freely, even in a business, without paying royalties.

If your team pays for Adobe Creative Cloud and uses Photoshop mainly for resizing, exporting, or templated work, it's worth asking: could an open tool handle that — and eventually, could an agent handle it for you?