For years, illustrators, photographers, designers, and video editors have been held under the thumb of a single software company: Adobe.
The infamous Adobe Creative Suite, later rebranded as the Creative Cloud — a change which brought about an end to true offline use — has long dogged creatives with its incredibly high subscription fees, representing an ironclad grip on the world of artists and other creatives.
Though plenty of competitors have tried to ram their way into the market, few have been able to make a dent against the dominant Creative Cloud. That may be about to change — and not because of a tech giant like Apple, but thanks to the efforts of a four-person team vibecoding out of Atlanta, Georgia.
Introducing ArtCraft: a new free and open-source software suite for creatives whose apps bear a striking similarity to Adobe’s perennial editing tools. Instead of Photoshop, there’s PhotoCraft, the “open-source image editor you already know how to use.” In place of Lightroom — the industry standard processing app for photographers — there’s LightCraft, which requires “no account, no cloud, no telemetry, no subscription.”
You get the idea. ArtCraft is, at its core, an effort to reverse engineer Adobe’s software in order to build an equivalent product with none of the downsides. Gone are the obnoxious cloud connectivity “features,” as are the sky-high monthly subscription fees.
There are a few caveats here. For starters, the ArtCraft apps are all in active development, with a few tools in the “early alpha” stage, meaning a professional user is probably stuck with Adobe for the time being. The apps are also packed with various AI offerings, so anybody seeking the manual Creative Suite experience of yesteryear will probably have to dodge some prompt windows, though AI use is by no means required by ArtCraft’s apps.
The vibe-coded nature of the project has likewise given some pause — as one user commented on the “FuckAdobe” subreddit, it’s a “very impressive” effort, but though “AI makes it much easier to build prototypes quickly,” they aren’t “necessarily polished, stable products.”
Others are just eager to get off Adobe, regardless of what might be going on under the hood.
“Briefly tried it. Absolutely amazing,” a commenter wrote under another Reddit post. “About time we leave adobe for good,” another groused.
Of course, the team at ArtCraft has their work cut out for them if they hope to contend for a slice of Adobe’s nearly $18 billion digital media empire — and with the vibe coded bedrock, the hardest part of the climb is a long way off.
More on software: Software Engineer Says AI Is Causing Chaos Among Coders Who Now Just “Press Enter” All Day, Have Stopped Thinking or Understanding Software
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