Adobe Creative Cloud inspired applications you should know about

Creation of these alternatives highlights how AI-assisted coding is accelerating complex software development.

Adobe Creative Cloud is a well known application suite used by professionals all over the world, for creative work like photography, design, video editing and much more. This has always come at a cost which is not affordable by all. Although Adobe offers student discounts and annual subscriptions at a subsidised rate.

A collection of applications offering free alternatives to Adobe Creative Cloud tools has been taking Github by storm with over 66k Github stars already.

Launched under the ArtCraft banner, an open-source applications include photoCraft which is an alternative to Photoshop, FilmCraft similar to Premier Pro and LightCraft which takes inspiration from Lightroom. Other tools include VectorCraft for Illustrator, EffectCraft for After Effects and PDFCraft for Acrobat.

The applications were built in Rust using prompt engineering using Anthropic‘s Claude. Their creators describe the software as “Clean-room reimplementation” recreating the software functionality without directly copying the original source code.

The testing of PhotoCraft reveals that user interface closely resembling Photoshop, with a similar toolbar and layer structure. However, the application do not yet offers all the features available in Adobe Photoshop.

This opens up a great opportunity for students and freelancers to make use of this for their projects and save on the subscription cost.