A PSD carries Photoshop's answer key. The UI has none.

Description and use

PhotoCraft accurately reproduces Photoshop blend modes for 14 test PSDs, yet its UI still fails on basic tasks.

Problem

How can a young open‑source project correctly implement Photoshop blend modes when its own tests pass but users report basic tasks failing?

Outcome

PhotoCraft accurately reproduces Photoshop blend modes for a set of 14 test PSDs, but its UI still exhibits functional gaps, indicating that accurate rendering alone does not guarantee a complete Photoshop replacement.

Workflow

• 1. Clone the PhotoCraft repo and note its 231,000 lines of Rust and 748 CLI commands.
• 2. Download the macOS CLI zip from the v0.2.0 release, verify its SHA256SUMS and Developer ID signature.
• 3. Run photocraft-cli --version to confirm the binary.
• 4. Use photocraft-cli info on a hand‑made PSD to inspect layer styles.
• 5. Convert a PSD to PPM with photocraft-cli convert and compare the output to Photoshop’s merged image using a Node script.
• 6. Execute a command with photocraft-cli run to test layer‑style blending options.
• 7. Observe that blend‑mode results match Photoshop’s render within 2/255 for all 14 test files.
• 8. Note that UI tasks such as crop frame movement and shortcut handling still fail, as reported by users on HN and in the project’s parity list.

Evidence

PhotoCraft's test suite is built on that. crates/io/tests/corpus.rs opens each real‑world PSD, flattens the layers with PhotoCraft's own compositor, and compares the result with the merged image Photoshop saved.

Source

All 14 landed within 2/255 of Photoshop's render.

Source

When I cloned it, the repo held about 231,000 lines of Rust by my count, two dozen crates in layers a build check enforces, and a CLI whose registry listed 748 commands.

Source

Several testers say they could not get basic tasks done, and the maintainer says the repos went public before they were ready.

Source