IT Home On October 9, it was reported that for many years, whether they are illustrators, photographers, designers, or video editors, it has been difficult to get out of Adobe’s control.
The Adobe Creative Suite software suite has long been criticized for its high subscription fees. During the later rebranding to Creative Cloud, the software also lost its true offline usage capability. The high subscription costs and dependence on the software have made it difficult for artists and other creative workers to get rid of Adobe in the long term.
Although many companies have tried to challenge Adobe, it has never been able to shake the market position of Creative Cloud. According to foreign media outlet Futurism on the 8th local time, what has changed the situation is a four-person team in Atlanta, Georgia, USA: by using AI to generate code, they have developed an alternative product called ArtCraft for Adobe software.
This product is free and open source, and its various applications are very similar to Adobe’s classic editing software. Among them, PhotoCraft is positioned as a competitor to Photoshop, claiming to be “an open-source image editor that you already know how to use”; LightCraft aims to replace the professional photo processing software Lightroom commonly used by photographers, with the features being “no account required, no cloud services, no telemetry data collected, no subscription needed”.
According to IT Home, ArtCraft’s goal is not complicated: redeveloping various Adobe software through reverse engineering, preserving similar functions while removing parts that users dislike: there is no need for cloud connectivity, and no monthly high-cost subscription fees.
All apps under ArtCraft are still in development, with some still in the early Alpha testing phase.
ArtCraft primarily relies on AI-generated code for development, which has also raised some concerns. A Reddit user commented in the “FuckAdobe” thread that ArtCraft’s results are indeed impressive, and AI has made rapid prototype development much easier. However, just because the prototypes are developed quickly does not mean the final product is sufficiently mature and stable.
Many people simply don’t care how the software is developed at all. They just want to say goodbye to Adobe as soon as possible.
In the comments section of another Reddit post, one user wrote: “Just tried it out and it’s absolutely amazing.” Another user complained: “It’s time to completely get rid of Adobe.”