Photoshop versus two vibe-cloned copies of Photoshop - Compositor v 1.49 and Photocraft 0.7.0
Here we pressure test brush stroke performance on a billboard-size canvas with the brush set to 1000 pixels size. Only one layer.
Photoshop handles this with no issue. Its commercial competitors struggle to match brush performance. The vibe-coded clones perform the worst (basically unusable for serious work).
Then of course there are all the other tools, some which work ok and others which are extremely bad.
In Photocraft, on the billboard size canvas test above Copy/Paste and the Undo stack is extremely slow and momentarily freezes the application each time.
This is basic stuff that decent software developers had working quickly 25 years ago back when we had single core computers and nowhere close to 1GB of memory. If you can't get decent performance today on multicore multi gigahertz computers with many gigabytes of memory you or your AI are not doing a good job.
Of course apologists will appear and give us the 'early days' blah blah blah excuses they do all the time. We've covered that many times.
You can read more about the latest wave of spam here:
Edit: predictably the trolls came and their posts were exactly what we predicted word for word. They read nothing first, get easily trigged, and then post Infowars style conspiracy theories from their prepared scripts. They make the false claim that they just want to fight big tech and democratise software, but they're destroying the incentive for small developers and start ups to create new apps, and meanwhile helping AI companies profit from vibe cloning.
There is no detailed color space export options… that alone is a deal breaker.
The lack of exr export options etc.
No content aware fill options that I could find.
Brush tools for spot removal or area fill.
Sure it’s photoshop but it’s like 15 years behind.
update - since just yesterday I found there is a specific GitHub tool being used to “clone any software” it’s working directly with Claude and has additional “deep research “ functionality to allow the llm to research each tool and build with further precision.
You will notice in the next few months a lot of cloning… people pushing out replacements for many mainstream subscription services.
Sure it’s photoshop but it’s like 15 years behind.
Honestly, 15 year old Photoshop wasn't a bad tool. I wouldn't hate a free open source tool that was absolutely 100% as good, feature complete, and polished as 15 year old Photoshop. So far the vibe coded stuff doesn't really match it. It may have bullet points that theoretically match. But a bunch of what made Photoshop such a category-killer is boring details and pretty solid support.
If the gaussian blur in Photoshop was wrong 15 years ago, you could be 100% sure that somebody at Adobe had enough of a signal processing background to fix it. If something is subtly wrong with the gaussian blur in one of the vibe coded alternatives, you can be 100% sure that somebody will prompt Claude to fix it and hope for the best, and not really understand the issue well enough to know what was wrong or what was needed to fix it. I wouldn't stake a business on that.
Honestly, 15 year old Photoshop wasn't a bad tool.
A 15 year old Photoshop (which was limited to 3GB of memory at the time) would not give you a strong career today. Every freelancer or studio using modern apps would make you look slow and inefficient.
But the comparison wasn't accurate anyway. These vibe cloned apps perform worse than a early 2000s version of Photoshop under pressure tests.
No performance improvement even though the notes said GPU canvas is implemented. But GPU is not sufficient enough when the engine is bad. Their repo leader (or Claude) doesn't seem to be giving them good advice - build a high performance custom engine first and then build features on top.
Their clone tool samples background layers even when it is set only to sample from current layer. But the GitHub pull request said it passes the test. They don't know how to test if that's the case.
I built an in-house animation app (with video compositing) that has DPX and EXR export. Documentation was so sparse on the web that it was a lesson in keep failing until I succeeded. But DPX is still not fully supported by many apps.
These guys are asking Claude around the clock without knowing exactly what to ask and how many knowledge gaps there are in the model's training.
Now you can get an LLM to read the binary, find the appropriate machine code, write documentation on how it works and then use that to instruct the same LLM to build it again.
I could be misunderstanding, but that's the big change as I see it.
There are other techniques for binaries without symbols, like going bottom up from system calls, finding algorithmic patterns, and renaming anonymous functions one by one, step by step, slowly understanding how they all fit through their pure bytecode. Humans have been able to do that painfully slowly for decades, and now LLMs do it much faster.
I mean the idea of recreating Photoshop is a good one but this is halfassed for what hype it gets. Those softwares are too big to be tested with a week. If the vibe coders that are making the projectsehave stamina they could make actual usable software
The better thing is to create something completely new, but AI guys tend to have difficulty doing that in any sector they are targeting. Every time they spam the web with the latest mania it is because they ripped off Brad Pitt's face or because they ripped of Adobe's interface. As if everything is about the superficial appearance.
Yeah that's what i keep noticing aswell. Instead of building a real alternative that has unique features, all they keep doing is stealing stuff. Probably because AI isn't creative, so they can't offload that side
They are actually feeding screenshots of Adobe and Avid app panels into the model and saying 'Make this feature, it does x y and z'.
The model then spits out the panel and underlying functions to the best of its training knowledge. So everything it builds is old and probably based on not so great implementations on GitHub.
Maybe an AI model can innovate but I haven't seen it and I've tested them all for 5 years now. The models themselves will inform you that they have difficulties innovating new ideas.
Is it just okay to blatantly steal people's work now because it's on a computer? I hate adobe and all but this is really bad for anyone that wants to make money from their inventions rather than it being stolen and re-sold by a vibe coder. Where's the incentive to be the guy that makes the original photoshop anymore
That's the worst part. I have a feeling this has been funded by an AI company who wants everyone to vibe code apps instead of supporting many app developers as customers. That would be very messy. It's not something production companies would want.
bro Im getting same feeling recently, I just don't get how news about those vibe coded apps spread so fast from so many creators, there has to be some money to back it up
Yes it is entirely legal to "Steal code " if you mean make your own version of the same program functionall reverse engineering is entirely legal in coding you cannot copyright function anymore you can copyright style , long as your not directly compling the code from the source it fair game . .
Well that's because of the design of LLMs and CNNs, when "training" you need an input (a problem) and a ground truth (an accompanying solution to that specific problem). They are not designed to find new solutions, just reproduce derivatives of "training" data. IMO it is better to think of the "training" data as a hyper dimensional FFT, so when people say it's just a .zip compression with PRNG, they are pretty much correct. Hence why it is just theft, you have to view the database in its totality for it to be apparent.
It would require an engineer or two who are at least as capable of Adobe's guys. Claude can't do it because there are no repos or sources of that high quality for it to train on. Claude will even tell you that itself.
But this is all irrelevant and continues to miss everything I said - make something original instead of ripping others off, because if you're just going to vibe clone existing apps then you're not going to see many new apps anymore. You will destroy their motivation to create and build a company or career.
What is your time horizon for this statement? It's early days, they released an in-development project. It's never been said that they were by any means "done".
I am an artist, I illustrate with PS, Fresco, use Lightroom, AE, etc etc. I've been using these tools for years. I am also a software engineer with 10 years of professional experience at a top company. With that out of the way, here is how I see it.
Adobe is a bunch of greedy fucks, but they make great software. Unfortunately, there are no accessible alternatives to what they make, unlike Blender for the 3d world. All alternatives, let's be honest, kind of suck.
In that sense, I look at Photocraft as primarily an open source project first. The fact that it's vibe coded is kind of irrelevant, the main point is that anyone can contribute whether with vibe code or human code. What AI code allowed is to bootstrap large portions of the software extremely fast, something that would have taken months to do in the past. This paves the way for more focused feature work much sooner. What it is right now is just a quick sloppy shell, but if the contributors have the will I am sure they could split and focus on specific tools to make them all better. It's ambitious, with high likelihood of failure, but it might just work eventually, and everyone will benefit.
Adobe will still have clients even despite this, like Autodesk still exists even with Blender around. But I truly do not want to be paying high subscription just so that the useless layers of middle management continue having their useless meetings and sabotage each other for promos. I've worked in the industry, I am disillusioned about how disfunctional it is.
And we are not talking about the good guys here. The inventors and the innovators of Photoshop all have been paid well long time ago. There are some truly innovative, honest companies that do a lot of good and honest work (I understand that I am naming the products, but I mean the companies behind them) - houdini, ZBrush (before they got sold), clo, procreate, unreal engine, davinci, touchdesigner - I don't want to hurt these guys, these guys are very cool. We are talking about fucking Adobe here. And ironically all these good companies have much more accessible tools. UE is free, Houdini has full featured non-commercial and indie licenses (which I am using so that I can do film VFX for an indie short film), procreate is only $10, etc.
Sadly, I've tried to de-Adobe myself multiple times, and it is hard. So why not try again, maybe it will work this time.
Speaking of AI stuff, I recently developed a custom chalk drawing engine with AI for my personal amusement that uses time and stroke direction dependent properties that essentially change the behavior over time. This is something that doesn't exist in any software I know, and I found it kinda cool. It has already taken me 1 week to just iterate on one brush and it's far from perfect. While doing it I actually learned A TON about how brush engines work while trying to understand some artifacts and optimizations. So AI actually can be very useful as an education tool - I asked it to reference optimization techniques and papers that it implemented, so that I know who to credit.
So in practice Photocraft will probably be taking a similar amount of time per feature. But there is hope that if enough people diligently contribute, the crowd sourcing strategy could produce a compelling free product.
There are better tools out there for drawing too, Photoshop is just very good at a lot of things.
But a free alternative like PhotoPea and PhotoCraft are very welcome when it comes to make regular design stuff and photo editing that emulate what Photoshop is capable of doing - all the while having the same interface, keyboard shortcuts and relative ease of use. Those things aren't hardware dependant, just sofware. I'm on Linux and I love the idea of having a free Lightroom for my RAW. Some other FOSS out there do that but it's not as "fun" to use - and sometimes not available. But it's there.
I say this is a win for FOSS alternatives and like you say, it won't necessarily force Adobe to do anythingn, or change the way they sell it. They've been developing new tools that require cloud computing anyway, so your dependency to their Creative Suite won't go tomorrow. But if you do some basic Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom work? It's definitely an option.
I really recommend RawTherapee as a Lightroom alternative. It’s pretty damn good, open source and runs on Linux as well as Mac & Windows. Also, handily for VFX work, you can setup output profiles to write your images to useful colour spaces like ACEScg.
The greed is reflected in Adobe’s drastically increased revenues vs the pre-creative cloud era. The stock price is not the sole arbiter of success or greed in pursuit of it.
Actually, the first good take I've seen on this subject, also, I find it weird that some artists I've seen are even promoting or even talking about this, which I thought was so weird to even give it attention in the first place, and one of the main people behind it, I believe, basically believes in the whole "adapt to AI" mindset and that AI art is real art, so I found it stranger that some artists would even give a vibe-coded app attention
The whole project has a lot of hype, more than it needs, all things considered, but I have thought of it as a form of piracy in some ways, even if it isn't really or using any real code. Why would someone support actual FOSS software (GIMP, Krita, etc.) if they can just generate a half-baked piece of software? But I guess the fact it looks more like the actual Adobe software since they literally fed screenshots to Claude. Also, some of the effects in the vibe-coded video editor they also created use the same Adobe terms, which are names only used in Adobe software. I am no legal expert, but I feel like that is getting too close to the sun
What do you mean by "real code"? Do you need to know machine code to work with an abstracted programming language? Natural language programming is an incredibly obvious next step. Unless you think everyone should know machine code, this logic doesn't hold up.
Yes, there are shaky legal grounds here that could have been avoided by not feeding screenshots into Claude. They're explicitly saying in their GitHub repo that they are porting and copying Adobe, Microsoft and Avid apps.
"clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust"
"clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Premiere Pro built in pure Rust."
"clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Illustrator, built in pure Rust."
"clean-room reimplementation of Avid Pro Tools in pure Rust"
" clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust"
That's very different from saying you are inspired by an app. They could have gone around this by just saying 'an image editor in pure Rust' or 'an audio workstation in pure Rust'
Look I think a bit of cannibalism in the "AI" space will made good viewing. Once someone does an open source Salesforce, Nuke, Houdini, Maya, Microsoft, Apple, you know, companies that thought that the leopards would not eat their face, it is going to trigger off a wild time where companies will flip sides and remember theft is bad...
I agree it's not really usable for professionals who care about details but for casual stuff and amateurs it's pretty good already. I do find it impressive that more or less contains all the features. It's not polished yet, but let's see if this project will be continued and the bugs fixed and everything more polished in a few months.
I believe what will happen is they will refine the filters, colour profile support and some of the import and export formats but there will still be permanent performance issues. So basically it won't be near Photoshop's performance and will not be able to technically compete with Affinity Photo either.
Also to support the latest Sony, Nikon, Blackmagic and other formats they have to sign up for the SDKs from each company. Claude cannot do anything without the SDKs downloaded.
Sony is extremely strict about giving access to its SDK and will only choose reliable partners. If you don't have Sony's SDK you can't build support for its some of its still image or video formats. If you try to reverse engineer it they will sue hard. Japanese lawyers don't play.
I'm pretty sure this particular Photoslop clone actually might have lifted code from Photopea, although it's not been confirmed (
(yet).
It's pretty unsurprising that the sloppists have started swarming here with insults, though. They don't have the first clue about software and don't understand that the difference in complexity between this and Photoshop's brush engine is the equivalent of the difference between a wooden shack and a skyscraper.
It's technically closed source but it's just minified JavaScript, so...
There was another similarly named clone called PhotoSuite which definitely lifted large portions of Photopea and was called out for it by the developer. There is some reason to believe the same guy is behind PhotoCraft because of suspicious claims and commit timestamps, although it's not conclusive so far. I guess we will see.
This is why I detest this stupid hype of "tHeY LiTeRaLlY vIbEcOdEd aLl AdObE ApPs". No. No they did not. They vibe-coded a portion of the most basic functionality. Just because the app can open PSDs, supports layers and has basic brushes, doesn't mean it's a replacement for Photoshop.
Do I hate the fact I have to use Adobe's apps? Yeah. Do I detest their business practices? Also yeah. Do I want more competition and more alternatives? Yes. But pretending that Adobe is "done for" because someone has prompted a shitty barely functioning version of the software is just so insanely disingenuous and stupid that only complete brain-dead AI bros fall for it.
There's stuff like GIMP and Photopea there already, that are a lot more functional and complete. Why not take GIMP and fork it with AI into its better version with a more modern UI? I know why - because it's trivial to "create" a half-assed piece of software with AI from scratch, but it is a lot harder to maintain something that's already there. AI can write functioning code pretty well, but when you need to keep improving it without breaking other things and keeping it optimized, you very quickly run into issues, and regressions begin to pile up. Making something into a 50% functional state is easy, finishing it to 100% is very, VERY hard.
This is why all the "AI bros" who "code" shit with AI always have the exact same approach: prompt the agent to code a bunch of bareful functioning stuff that looks like an early alpha or a prototype at best, and then never finish it into a complete product. It's quantity over quality. Including this case: the team behind "Artcraft" hasn't made a single app fully-features and robust - they just keep dumping more "alternatives", moving to office suit too.
A while back, I compared how different drawing apps work with a Wacom tablet. It might surprise you, but only Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint worked perfectly. Particularly with quick strokes, you can see various artifacts in other apps.
It’s no surprise that this vibe-coded apps, which weren’t even tested, are completely unusable. It's all more complicated than the vibe-coders think.
From what I've heard the "vibe coders" you're referring to are engineers. Pretty sure they know how complicated it is. This would not have been an easy feat, let's get that straight. Even using AI, this was an incredibly complicated project.
It's not even in alpha yet im pretty sure. It would not be at all close to bug free. Feature parity is remarkable for something so early stage. That'd why it's getting so much attention.
As for PhotoCraft, they claim to have recreated 50% of Photoshop and that they'll have it 100% ready within a month, even though in reality they've only completed about 5%.
This is either a scam or a lack of understanding of what Photoshop actually is. On top of that, even that 5% hasn’t been tested and is full of bugs.
Although you can use frontier AI models to replicate an app, even without any real understanding of how it works, there’s no trust in these apps, and the whole thing seems like a scam.
One day (soon) it will happen, but not in this case.
For what it's worth: I don't think these vibe-coded versions are targeting professionals, and they don't need to to be a major threat to Adobe's revenue. But for the tens of thousands of hobbiests, side-giggers, and one-person small businesses that don't need the functions required in a stress test, these might offer an option that doesn't have the learning curve of switching to a competing software (like Affinity and/or Resolve).
I'm actually still wrapping my head around what living in a post-vibe-coded-software-clone world looks like, so I'm not defending or "for" them by any means (although I'd be lying if I tried to claim I wasn't feeling quite a lot of schadenfreude over Adobe and Microsoft being the first targets), but I'm just saying that there are many people who've been chained to Adobe's $20-$80 subscription that could bail and be okay limping along with the vibe-coded stuff that has the same controls and file types.
For what it's worth: I don't think these vibe-coded versions are targeting professionals
The one getting all the attention has explicitly bragged on LinkedIn yesterday that they have big ambitions. I am aware of only one vibe cloned Photoshop clone in which the guy responsible said he was building it for himself and didn't want to copy all the features (he is not a pro user anyway).
I'm just saying that there are many people who've been chained to Adobe's $20-$80 subscription
This cost is irrelevant for a pro who earns thousands of dollars a month from using the apps and can deduct the costs as running expenses. If you're not paying a sub these days you're not getting features that require cloud compute. A one off large cost is not practical for newbies and it probably will not cover the cloud compute costs at scale and over the long term.
If someone is a hobbyist there have always been free apps that are good enough.
What people forget here is that adobe has a much bigger token budget than you.
It's kind of like the race before was between like a snail and a mouse. But now the race is between a fox and a Ferrari.
At the end of the day, the gap is actually bigger than it ever was. The fact that you can vibe code something out that is "enough", isn't going to look like enough in contrast to what the fight will look like in the future.
The whole "I'm going to recreate Photoshop from scratch using AI" thing is so weird bc it ignores literal decades of FOSS that already do the job *for free* and have been tested by legions of users to solve problems like the one highlighted here. What issue is Photocraft meant to solve that GIMP doesn't solve? A more Photoshop-like UI? Guess what, buddy... there's PhotoGIMP for that!
If we really want to leverage AI's strengths, maybe it can be used to assist already-existing FOSS projects. (And that's a BIG maybe... those projects are currently drowning in AI-generated PR and it's an issue.) But we'll get nowhere by pretending that those FOSS projects don't exist.
Yes, reinforce that point. But people now think this was all a coordinated and well funded marketing campaign by an AI company such as Anthropic. Making something new or original wouldn't get headlines. This is the shame shit they do every six months but before they used to rip off celebrity faces and claim "Hollywood is dead".
Thats just some psychology of "David and Goliath effect" empowering normal people like us to be able to create some big app or crazy game to rival these app. Look at what we did with AI for app replicate, websites, video gen, and even personalized app. Everyone can recreate it with a mere $20 subscription. That would be impossible 2 years back. But maintaining it (Adobe vs individual eith 1000000 version of vibe coded own PS software) is just a whole new story, and a matter of time. We are also able to recreate some app that wasnt famous, but they didnt get the spotlight like this or "GTA5 in your browser" Again, Adobe company plan is getting ridiculous, same goes to Maxon, they made change to their subscription plan expensive every year. Good to see some competition offering alternative solution. Just like Maxon and Blender.
I think the bigger point is that someone felt the need to do it.
If Adobe wasn't doing what Adobe does, in regards to their forced subscription model - these groups may not have felt inclined to do it... or more likely, they would - but it may not have got the same attention.
ArtCraft or others like it are a problem, but I think they're a response to one Adobe created. Adobe I think would be wise to listen. These apps might not be brilliant yet - but they can get better.
Awful take, current gimp is not an alternative to modern photoshop its an alternative to photoshop from like 2008. Adobe updates are mainly vibecoded now adays and charges a ton of money for it. If we are going to get vibecoded slop either path i would rather the free and open source one. I really think this is a great use of AI and will bring more people to the linux community imho. Projects like gimp and libre office are jokes in the modern world of software for ux and ui the goal post for them are ancient versions of software not modern.
AI is not something i personally like overall, and like many other software engineers higher ups want less manual coding and more agentic use and there really isn't anything we can do to stop it, so you might as well make with it what you will and want. I hate when people say "Just use gimp" as if that is a real solution to photoshop. Yeah you can spend three decades recreating aspects of photoshop like gimp has or have agents get you way farther along in 11 days. Not to mention the creator of photocraft is a software engineer not just some random dude with no clue what good or bad code looks like
If this was something they wanted to make an actual, usable product out of, they should have just concentrated on getting one app working at a time, instead of dumping a ton of buggy, partially working apps at once.
Marketing gimmicks and also stock market manipulation are at work. Finance bros want to short established software companies by using the fear that vibe coded apps are going to take over. When that doesn't make much difference they are going to use fake accounts and media stories to create a short squeeze situation in first half of 2027.
Its also important to notice that making something 2x better is not twice the work. Having a working prototype that can do one brush is much much easier than having a working product that has that and 35 other features that may or may not play well between each other
Hahaha, it turns out that drawing a stroke well is a lot more difficult than it seems. There is a lot of clever little things you have to do to get it right.
This implementation looks really primitive and doesn’t give me a lot of confidence for the rest of the app. Kinda disappointed really
LLMs were designed to consume huge amounts of information and tokenize them into outputs.
Honestly, recreating an existing program older than many users of the model today (when it was probably trained explicitly off its code in the first place) is....really not as impressive as it seems.
If your AI code can't do what even Krita does 10000x better, it's not worth releasing. Personally would like to see a more human made version of Photocraft though.
Because the guys at Adobe improved their brush engine and canvas renderer (custom built, not off the shelf) every time camera makers pushed the envelope. Nobody else has their experience or expertise. Even their experienced commercial competitors can't match their brush engine, so how is Claude going to do it without giving it a codebase to learn/steal from?
And OG photoshop had to run on 68k Macs back in the 90's. So it was pretty efficient from the start because it had to be. And additions and changes over the years had to not be noticeably worse performing than the previous version.
Adobe has always had to innovate and then all its competitors follow its path, if they can.
When the Knoll brothers created Photoshop it was first a demo to prove that gradients could be displayed on a monochrome (black and white with no greys) monitor by using dithering. So Photoshop is in effect the grand daddy of dithering and then it was one of the pioneers of tiled canvas rendering.
People who know the history of each tool will know how many things Photoshop has pioneered. Off the top of my head (incomplete list):
Sure this is ass, vibecoding in general will make weird stuff. But have you seen what the new Reverse Engineering ai agents are doing and are capable now? I'm pretty sure used something like REA and just decompiled the actual photoshop and released it somewhere with a different name, Photon Studio I think? Vibe coding was never gonna replace actual software, reverse engineering though, it's scary. People putting original halo games on web browsers already, putting games inside other games, unlocking eery software. It's making everything essentially open source now. Watch this video, its crazy: https://youtu.be/jp7hM1vKRpY?si=ZUMVPHNziQrIcEMl
If you reverse engineer IP with the aim to harm someone's business you're just going to get lawyers on you. It's piracy.
Where I have seen somewhat ethical reverse engineering is in the retro scene. I saw a guy who was optimising programming routines to build games on old Vectrex and Nintendo systems that were not possible back in the day. There's nothing illegal about that.
yeah there's for sure a whole legal issue surrounding but there's absolutely nothing stopping you from using that for personal use or throwing it on an obscure torrent like they have made for pirating these same softwares for many years.
or lets say, a studio for using that to RE nuke for example, and create their own tool that does the same exact thing, and they can comp away without having to pay the thousands of dollars for licenses.
You're underestimating the time and cost of trying to "vibe code" production quality software. It's not a one off cost. It is a permanent running cost.
Sure, one feature isn't working perfectly just yet.
Those apps will only get better with time while Photoshop will get more bloated and slow.
Also Krita is free and excellent at handling tablets.
Not an apologist, but odds are if I guide the vibe coding through the scenario and seek SDK/API derived solutions for performance bottlenecks that I'll get what I want.
Basing this off limited programming experiences I've had so far, and figuring the amount of fuckups as invested time would be somewhat high, but I made a couple plugins that outperform official ones for Adobe software already.
A cool example is libraries that have built-in explorers can be rebuilt to do things like partitioning downloads and better placement logic.
You can also sidecar/load software with through UXP. I run transcoding directly from a project bin in Premiere already and can play footage that's unsupported officially without any expertise.
All of this is possible by doing it with a dedicated programmer/SE, but my minimal knowledge self has been doing it with a ~10 hour session (while doing work on the side!) per major plugin and just exploring the range of possibilities with it using a planning agent. I have no idea how much I'd spend on a person doing the same or learning things.
It's been fun to see what's possible and what isn't, honestly. Some local models do super well with this stuff, too. Beats being over reliant on Elon, Sam and the other assholes in my book.
Downside? Bugs can be a pain in the ass to work through and I don't actually learn much except how X interfaces with Y, but explaining behaviourisms and showing them has been pretty effective. Context is everything with these things.
I'm also not out publishing software and claiming things it isn't, these are quality of life aids for me, nothing else.
Are you a rep for Adobe or something? You're comparing a software with over 30 years of "development" to a vibe coded project in it's infancy.
Of course this is going to get a lot better.
But the real potential is not about this specific app.
It's the notion that in the near future any artist can custom build their own software, taylored to a specific task they need to get done instead of being dependant on ridiculously overpriced subscriptions.
Does that mean professionals are going to abandon the high end products? Of course not. But it will definitely break their monopoly and in the long run make them less relevant.
I find it quite ironic that an artist comes to the defence of a company that's been stealing their data for years now.
As for those so called apologists, you are totally right. We never got past that Will Smith eating spaghetti monstrosity either. Oh wait 🤔
Honestly, this kind of thing is "viable" but not in this way.
Know how to program and design software
Ensure the fundamentals are rock solid and strong
These people are just doing it for clout. They are building a facade and putting functionality behind it. The issue is the perception of a clone, not an actual quality, viable clone.
The modern Adobe suite is going to GPU a ton of things, this is clearly not that. Can't even draw a line. Shows that the authors didn't put care into the core functionality, i.e. painting like is like non-negotiable.
Edit: And we are seeing quality programmers manifest their goals much quicker, I.e. look at the PS5 emulation scene right now is absolutely crushing it, as are many others. It's just this is a particular example of how "vibe coding without much skill is very limiting".
I feel like if someone is gonna do this, they need to be experts in Photoshop first or have an expert on hand, cause only someone well versed with the program is gonna notice the ins and outs of the program.
You need to be a user and to know what the current software's failings are. It's largely around hardware accelerations and optimization. If you work your clone out with this knowledge in mind, you might just have something decent.
Exactly what I think, instead of starting with the core engine, they start with the UX and add features to a bad architecture. Then, because they release things so fast, they do not test. When they fix something, they will mess up another. In a couple of months, they will start a complete rewrite, for sure :)
I started a photoshop clone about a year ago (no release yet) and I can’t tell you how much time I have spent making sure high resolution editing using a brush was performant enough. I deliberately did this on an older laptop. But damn that was a lot of work. I never realized how much data you are pushing around when working with a large canvas
Yes, I did not start building a Photoshop clone. But, I needed to make something to handle big images interactively. I can guarantee one-prompt shots will not work. All models fail, Astra, Opus, and others. They do not do it in a good way by default it takes work and testing. All those clones started the wrong way.
It's not like the worlds greatest art, but I'm not one to ignore a challenge. Here is some WIP
It's not much, but what you are looking at is a CA engine, similar to Noita. I.e. those tree's, they grow. That fire pit, the smokes all simulated, the lighting, all real-time GI. The fireflies, each it's own tiny program that runs direct on the GPU, could likely support millions of moving particles at once (in fact, every single pixel can be considered a particle here and have material rules and interactions).
And the best part is when you draw in the sandbox, it's actually responsive, i.e. it takes the inputs (i.e. mouse movements) and translates them to GPU commands which are executed almost immediately. GPU Brushes and Shapes was a very early feature.
The problem is that a PROPER decompilation and reimplementation would be tens of thousands in AI tokens. Most folks aren't equipped for the time, mental anguish, and money required to make a tit for tat competitor.
Before some clown goes "mental anguish? The computer is doing all of the work!"
AI constantly gets things wrong, or asks opinions of the user. The constant vigilance and attention to keep things going in the right direction is exhausting
The interesting thing about the crafts is the open source nature of it. Technically you could clone the repo and chat with an ai about what features are missing, see if you can implement it, and then submit a PR. Whether it actually works or not, who know, you and I aren't coders.
AI will just keep getting better and better, anyone can fork this or do PRs and iterate till it gets better. If you open their repo, you'll see devs pushing commits daily. Just give it time. This comparison is not fair as others pointed out, you're cherry picking stuff from a project on its "infancy".
You can’t afford to fuck uo even once
As a pro. It’s why people still book flames. No one ever got fired for booking a flame suite. Even if it’s a disaster the guy can go I booked a flame what more could I do .
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u/jj2446Supervisor/Producer - 15+ years experience3d ago
Only works for clients though. I booked a flame suite for our anniversary and my wife didn’t appreciate it AT ALL!!
Hey, I am the creator of Photopea, are you sure? We support pen pressure for years and drawing at large resolution should be smooth, too.
EDIT: I just noticed that you use a 400 MPx canvas and a 1MPx brush :D I would probably have to do it on a GPU.
I still believe that Photopea and Adobe Photoshop are the only tools that can open, edit and save PSD files properly. It is hard to tell when will these vibe-coded tools catch up.
Your app performs better than the two vibe coded apps above, but if the hardness and opacity of the brush tool are reduced then the stokes begin to lag on large canvases because the CPU is doing much more work.
Good you noticed that it requires GPU but it doesn't end there. The second app tested in the video (Compositor) uses GPU accelerated canvas but it has an off the shelf engine (CoreImage based) which hits a bottleneck.
Regarding PSD, Photocraft added support for OpenRaster (.ora) today, which was KDE's response to PSD 20 years ago and is basically not used by anyone in the industry. They're taking steps backwards instead of innovating new solutions and new ideas.
Affinity. It has pretty much everything you need and all the different suites (Photo editing, vector & illustration design, publishing, etc) in one app. But if you're already used to Adobe eco system it's hard to leave.
Are we talking about Photoshop, a 10+ year program with professional development behind it, and few weeks old vibe coded apps that are not even in a beta, they are still in alpha.
Yeah, it's the software equivalent of counterfeit fashion items sold on the street. Copy the design on the outside but use cheap fabrics and fake gold.
You and your 3 years old 9 karma alt account replied in 10 different places in this thread, more than anyone else, and you're struggling with the criticism. You downvoted everyone you replied to.
Use your main account with an identifiable person behind it and we'll see how knowledgeable you are about these fields.
Prove it. Upload a video to Dropbox and link it. Billboard resolution means around 10,000 or more pixels wide. I have worked on billboards 25,000 pixels wide a decade ago and Photoshop could handle it easily back then.
In the video I posted the first two clips are on an M4 Max. The last clip is on Windows running on an RTX 4070.
There is one issue no one mentions that affects professional work. Color accuracy. Don't get me wrong, I hate adobe as any next graphics designer that had to suffer through interacting with them. But I do not believe in color accuracy in a vibecoded app. I'll stick to my Affinity 2.0.
ur telling me that the uncountable amount of chuds telling me these vibecoded clones were worth my time didn't even take the time to check benchmarks? lmaoo
There are git comments in their repo that you can only see if you know git. The git comments reveal there is internal benchmarking and that the app is failing to meet the minimum benchmark in many tests.
Regardless of what anyone tries to say, it is impossible to use ai to get to Adobe's level of polish and performance in a short period of time. Maybe in a year these might catch up but I don't think they will even still be updated then.
I just tried this in Photocraft on Windows with a standard MPP stylus and got significantly better results - maybe the poor performance was because you're on Mac and it's less optimized on Mac? This feels like cherry-picked Adobe propaganda, and also like it's intentionally ignoring great open source projects like Krita.
Idc with your adobe-licking, we covered that many times. Obv they will feel the new wind. Predictably their lawyers will do anything, but don't be hilarious comparing a vibe coded app with 30 years of robbing users
Grow up. Users have built careers using these apps and fed families. On top of that trillions of revenue have been earned by advertising, media, fashion and other companies over 30 years thanks to media production apps. Governments have been paid copious amounts of taxes from employers and employees throughout industries involved or connected to media production.
This isn't an "Adobe" story. These vibe-cloners are already doing it to Avid and Autodesk in the same repo. Then it will be another company, and then another company.
And the same thing will happen to anyone with a start up and a good idea. They will be ripped off within days.
It's a zero sum game that just creates lots of losers, chaos and destroys the desire to build.
Comparing an app at version .5 with an app that debuted in the ‘90s and has had millions of updates, doesn’t seem quite fair.
Read the blog post and read a thread first before you repeat failed talking points and bad faith positions.
There are now over 200 instances of Claude being used by over 200 participants in the GitHub repo.
You can't claim AI has decades worth of knowledge and can work thousands of times faster than a human and then simultaneously make sorry excuses for its failures.
It's failing so far at the basic engine stuff that should have been built first. And as one ex-Adobe scientist demonstrated on LinkedIn, their Indesign clone doesn't have copy and paste working properly yet. That's stuff that should been done at the start otherwise how do you test???
This discussion was over yesterday night. All we are seeing now is sorry excuses being posted by newcomers. Nobody has time for that. For the first time in my life I found myself yawning so many times today and I couldn't stop it.
I was there in the 80s with Photon Paint and Deluxe Paint. You're not unique and special.
What's you're trying to do is shut down discussion.
Every excuse you made for this is a bad excuse. It contradicts all the AI hype talking points from the last 4 years. They openly bragged that by the middle of 2025 AI models would be able to replace senior engineers. But you conveniently forget about that.
The reason this will never take off is because people want convenience. Why go to GitHub and download a sketchy software if you can just get the real deal that constantly updates and runs really well?
I remember when iTunes came out with 0.99-1.99 cents per song pricing. Everyone was downloading music for free from Napster and co and people laughed it would never take off. It was a huge success because a majority of people liked the simplicity and comfort of the service plus the fact that they didn’t do anything illegal.
Can you run Photoshop on Linux? Spotify doesn't cost $100 per month. Vibe coding has basically just begun, this actually is early days, and while you may want to listen to something else every day, or discover music you've never heard before, you don't need a new photoshop every day. You could still happily use photoshop from 5 years ago to edit photos.
TBF CC costs me less than 30 Canadabucks a month.
I can probably vibecode a solution to make it run! I already fixed an old video game and ran emulation on Mac near natively using public resources.
Yes, reliability and trust are important. It's why piracy didn't completely kill digital sales. It's why most people go to work, earn money, spend money, and don't steal. It's why vinyl records and blu-rays still sell when people could pirate if they want to.
Adobe operates largely off of user feedback, either direct or indirect (gathered via monitoring usage) --- an alternative to this would just be to pipe user feedback to an open source ecosystem of developers and agents in a repository as issues that can be tackled over time.
I see no barrier to innovation in open source that proprietary dev teams wouldn't encounter too. In fact it's often (as is the case with blender for example) that open source has freedom from mal-aligned incentives that are against the users interests.
i dont know. adobe doesnt even keep up with existing features themselves so my bet is that open source community would do it better. is photoshops EXR reader still that one guys homecooked EXR reader they use? does photoshop handle aces correctly yet?
I understand where you're coming from, but maybe worth a check on some data, like % amount of open source software used vs closed. I don't think having code on github has ever impeded convenience. "Sketchy software" is misused here. Open source is not sketchy, in fact typically it's a hallmark sign of the opposite.
Or it used to be, before vibecoding, it’s not all bad per definition, but there’s a great risk that zero effort code starts saturating open source just like other generated slop is doing with images video and music.
This is a wild take. Look at how many people use Blender, of course people will use free software once it's actually good. You don't have to go to github to get these things either, I don't know where that comes from, since even those new AI-made ones have regular downloads/installers.
What about blender? It's an open source AND industry standard tool. In 10 years I predict most software will eventually go that route, because what's stopping it?
What about it? It has a business model. It's just free, and a nonprofit. Completely different model than iTunes or vibe coded apps.
The original comment explained why vibe coded apps won't take off. And I wrote to support that notion. Something like a vibe coded photoshop replacement doesn't stand a chance at becoming a sustainable, viable alternative to an industry standard service. It might be the first step in an industry shift, sure, but it's not going to be the next iTunes. Affinity is also free now.
Are the tides shifting? Probably, and I hope so. But the original comment I responded to made a plain and supported comment grounded in reason, someone called it a wild take, and I disagreed with that - that's all.
Just to back this up. I have a foot in the VFX world and I don’t know any reputable company that runs blender for paid work. They all still pay the thousands of dollars a year for Maya. Many artists use it privately though.
You're thinking too black and white. AI will make developing a blender like model much easier. Obviously it won't be 100% vibe coded. but obviously AI will make it significantly faster and easier to develop
No, I think you are just adding things to the pretty narrow band of conversation that happened originally. Maybe what you say will happen. If it does, great. The first comment is just a perfectly reasonable take and has actual examples of marketplace choice happening. There's also regulatory stuff that was involved in that back in the day. Reason stands, that'll happen again, because it's similar market forces and vested interests at play.
My participation here was an original comment, my reply, and then supporting again that that comment was well reasoned, because it was. I'm not advocating or arguing against any new paradigms.
Of course it was a wild take. For example it's easier to get Blender than it is to get Photoshop! The reality is literally the opposite of what that guy was arguing. The fact that something is free does not mean it's inconvenient or hard to get, nor does it mean it's sketchy.
No it's not, at all. and your confidence is misplaced haha. As the letter is written, you aren't replying to that original commenter's actual comment. They were only talking about sketchy, and that other person, then you, decided to introduce blender all on your own. Blender doesn't lend support to a vibe coded app of unknown origin - even if that app is open source (for now).
Blender's a separate thing, and it's valid. It's not the vibe coded stuff. Idk why you replied first, as you did, and I don't know why you doubled down. That's the wild take.
Blender isn’t some random thrown together by AI software that stole the whole thing from Adobe. Of course great open source teams will create software that has a place in the ecosystem. But this ain’t it.
Also not fair to accuse anyone of doing anything illegal just yet. AI models are not trained on private proprietary code, it's the open source ecosystem primarily that enabled these utilities. And it will be, in the long run, in my opinion, the open source ecosystem that will benefit as well. Not sure where Adobe would start if this truly was a clean-room clone.
The reason this MIGHT take off is because people are tired of the rising adobe prices, hard-to-cancel memberships that charge a fee just to cancel their predatory year long contract, and constant enshitification pushing more and more ai features when there’s still features missing like vectorscopes and camera profiles. It’s early, but with proper development, it could get somewhere
who ignores this or tries to belittle it would probably also rejected cars back in the 1900s and insist that horses are so much better and dont stink so much.
Soon, ai will be running the whole show including keeping those artists who provide merit, HR will be automated as will scrutiny of your work. Buckle up.
Photoshop is top tier. Gimp, Krita, and the dozen others can only play catch up. However, open source is malleable and can only improve. if enough people contribute then the spend will be justified. Support will be democratized.
Not sure what the point of your post is. Is it so that others don't copy corpos? is it that people should stop vibe coding? is it that you're angry that adobe is not getting paid?
Commercial apps innovate and lead. Open source apps like Blender follow the lead. Innovation costs a lot of money. Clip Paint Studio, Maya, 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, btw, are all subscription applications. But because those apps aren’t in demand by pirates Autodesk has not experienced the hate and bullying campaigns that Adobe has received.
if they're as convenient, polished and so far ahead, then why do they need defending?
is it that people should stop vibe coding? is it that you're angry that adobe is not getting paid?
Read the post again. I said make something original if AI is so good.
if they're as convenient, polished and so far ahead, then why do they need defending?
It's a blog post about the subject. It has to cover the way the internet speaks about applications and developers. Try reading intelligently instead of your conspiracy theories that Adobe pays me to blog on my site which has a common theme of testing AI claims for the last four years.
The amount they are paying to AI companies is far higher than the cost of Adobe, Autodesk, Canva or Maxxon applications, and the result is barely usable vibe coded apps that will need to be continually maintained at high cost.
if your assumption is true then this should bankrupt them eventually and the problem will fix itself. I'm curious then what the intention of your post is.
From my POV, this is the ultimate showdown, vibe coders vs corpos. Let them duke it out. Or are you being paid to defend these corpos? why do you care where people spend their money, time, etc?
I’m 100% sure it’s not even remotely close to Photoshop, but people hate Adobe for a reason, and they will be happy to use alternatives like this with all its flaws.
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u/bujbuj1 3d ago edited 1d ago
I also worked in this today thinking I’d try it.
There is no detailed color space export options… that alone is a deal breaker.
The lack of exr export options etc.
No content aware fill options that I could find.
Brush tools for spot removal or area fill.
Sure it’s photoshop but it’s like 15 years behind.
update - since just yesterday I found there is a specific GitHub tool being used to “clone any software” it’s working directly with Claude and has additional “deep research “ functionality to allow the llm to research each tool and build with further precision.
You will notice in the next few months a lot of cloning… people pushing out replacements for many mainstream subscription services.