Yes, if it is any good, then Gimp will need to do more than just offer a skin to make it feel like PS.
One of the guys who wrote Adobe Lightroom (but no longer works for Adobe) said that the Lightroom clone looked impressive at first glance but was not so great in actual use.
I would anticipate lawsuits on this, even if no code has been pinched.
A lot of people do not like Adobe for their business practices; there’s a whole lot of Schadenfreude at Adobe’s expense!
Bare in mind this was all put together in about a week. It’s an alpha release, so if you’re used to the real deal, you’re going to be disappointed, but perhaps in weeks or a few months they might be able to get it up to scratch. I also read the code is much more efficient and therefore much reduced file sizes.
What this means for the future of software developers is anyone’s guess. As they’ve thrown musicians, artists, authors and countless others under the bus with little to no regards for their rights, they shouldn’t get too upset when it affects big businesses as well.
The kicker is whether the code is maintainable by a human - if so it might take off quite quickly, especially as it has been open sourced.
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" Status: PhotoCraft is in early alpha, and we want to be straight about where it stands: much of Photoshop’s feature surface exists in some form, but it is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work. The biggest gaps are AI/generative features, 15 missing tools, depth in typography and pro workflows, and plug-in compatibility. Every Photoshop menu item is wired to a command …, but that measures wiring, not behaviour. The honest, dimension-by-dimension picture and where we’re going next are in the [roadmap]
Expect rough edges, and please file issues (include your OS, document size, layer count and a screenshot). You can also tell us what broke on Discord."
*Removed some links.
There are around 300 contributors adding, enhancing, fixing faults in Photocraft, over 100 in Lightcraft today.
New releases are coming thick and fast, so if anyone is having problems or too many glitches it might be worth downloading new releases as they become available.
With so many people working on it as open source, I bet they’ll have a great suite of software by the end of it. Whether tech companies will freak out and start trying to issue new laws will be interesting, but they’ve trampled over many other people who have complained about their works being used to train AI. I will continue to download the latest updates, just in case it disappears at some point, but I don’t think I’ll use it until the functionality is more developed.
The same developers have a MS Office suite with Wordcraft instead of Word and Grid Craft intestead of Excel
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They are a crafty bunch
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Yes they even have a clever name. At the moment, their apps are “near enough”, soon when they start getting feed back, they should be “as good as” and before long “a lot better than”.
I note that the effort is not entirely altruistic - there are subscription rates to use their AI content.
There’s always someone after our money