PhotoCraft

PhotoCraft. The image editor you already know how to use. Layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, type, vectors and brushes in a native app written entirely in Rust. Open source, offline, and yours.

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■ PhotoShop
Adobe Photoshop is a proprietary raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows, macOS, and iPadOS. Originally started in 1987 as a display program named Display, temporarily called ImagePro, before being renamed Photoshop

PhotoCraft

You already know my story. I own a very old version of Photoshop to edit my photographs. That is, until Adobe forced users to pay for a subscription to use their software. Since they’ve become a subscription company, I have given up on supporting this company. Between the old Photoshop, I also pay and use Affinity … which went free to use with version 3.0. There are some other free Photoshop alternatives, such as Gimp, which I won’t use because I don’t like its name (it’s like if they called themselves BDSM)… but the latest Photoshop clone, Photocraft is on a totally different level! It is very close to Photoshop, and it was entirely built in a few weeks, using A.I.

Not only that, but the same guy released the entire Adobe suite for FREE as part of their ArtCraft software suite: PhotoCraft (Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere Pro), LightCraft (Lightroom), PdfCraft (Acrobat Pro), EffectCraft (After Effects), and DesignCraft (InDesign). What took decades for Adobe to build, was completely cloned in a matter of weeks. This is very impressive.

The story behind this Adobe clone is because the developer, Brandon Thomas, was frustrated with Adobe’s subscription model and cancellation fees (if you decide to cancel three months into a 12-month subscription, you have to pay a cancellation fee to Adobe to leave). Everybody hates Adobe, and for good reasons. This is the same company that used their software to access your files and to train its A.I. without your permission. Adobe is the same company that won’t allow users to use software they paid for.

So, I’m all in support of PhotoCraft. I did test out the software (version 0.7) and it’s pretty good. It handles layers and resizes and rotate just fine… however, it was doing something to my RAW file that didn’t quite look right. For now, I’ll stick to Affinity because it does a better job on denoise and interpret the colors of my RAW files. I think it’s still very early days for PhotoCraft, it’s only three weeks old. I’m sure with some time and feedback, that I think PhotoCraft can eventually replace PhotoShop – it is that good!

If this sounds amazing, check out the software at getartcraft.com. The best part is that you can download a “Portable” version, which is just unzip into a folder and you can just run the software without going through the Windows Installation process. There are also a Mac and Linux version. That Linux thing is pretty important, because as far as I know, Photoshop is not available on Linux at all.

P.S. I don’t know the legality of this, but I am going to assume that Adobe’s lawyers will try and put a stop to this. One can argue that none of Adobe’s software codes were stolen, since PhotoCraft was built using a different computer language and from scratch – and it’s open-source (meaning other people can fork or contribute to the new codes to improve the software).

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■ Handbrake
The raw file is too large, so you’ll need to shrink the film to a more manageable size using the free Handbrake. My personal preference is 720p, which is “good” quality and the file size is small enough that you can locally stream or put on a USB drive for travel. Unfortunately, re-sizing the 4k resolution to 720p, took my computer over 9 hours to encode.

Shutter Encoder

I have been meaning to write and endorse Shutter Encoder (shutterencoder.com) for a while now, because I use this free software all the time. I use it so much, that when I run into some money, I plan on donating to the developer (Paul Pacifico).

I will give you two scenarios that I use Shutter:

Scenario 1: My original Criterion Collection DVD of Seven Samurai came in two discs: parts one and two. When I rip the film, using Handbrake, I will get two files. The easiest way to combine those two files that I have found was using Shutter. You simply drag parts 1 and 2 into the Shutter window and choose “combine”, and it just works!

Scenario 2: A music promotional company sends me advance music for review. Unfortunately, they send it in Lossless Audio or uncompressed WAVE files… files that my old MP3 doesn’t support or understand. It’s not a problem with Shutter, you simply drag the files into the Shutter window and choose convert to MP3 with your bitrate and voila, MP3 files for days.

Shutter is really useful. There are other things you can use it for, like if you don’t want to convert a MKV to MP4, you can just “Re-Wrap” it. Like I said, I use it as much as I use Handbrake.