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.”
