Hello,
I guess you are all or did all hear about the artcraft suite by now.
For those who don’t it’s an opensource clone of the adobe suite.
Since I’m working on a painting app, I went directly to the photoshop clone: photocraft to see what it was like.
the claim
- It’s fully written in rust and is claimed faster than photoshop by the enthusiast people.
- it’s supposed to affect opensource positively somehow…
- it’s been done in a few weeks
On my side I observed
- 71 MB is pretty light for a photoshop replacement
- the logo of the app has nothing to do with the website and at least one is not that great
First impression
the first first impression
- it opens fast, it has a polished looking interface and all
- it looks like its really loaded with features
the second first impression
- the color picker looks bad, the gradation is compressed in weird ways, leading the black to be a tinny strip at the bottom
- I couldn’t resize it, so much for UX
- On document opening comparison done by another user, we can see the images don’t render correctly
Hands on
- Performance is literally out of the question. more on that next section.
- The people who did the port never tried to make a stroke in the software. Or they would have quickly realized that they don’t sample enough mouse positions…
Performance
So I was in an urge to see how it performs brush strokes… I did it in the same conditions than I do in Slap (my own painter):
- Single layer on a 3840x2100px canvas
- A 1000px simple round brush with no feathering whatsoever and a small enough spacing for strokes to look close to continuous.
It’s laggy, laggy like, not fit for painting at all. Pushing the brush a bit further results into spinners and plain freeze.
This is nowhere comparable to Photoshop or Krita. As for Slap, I will not brag here, but I will say it definitely made me feel I was not doing all this work in vain.
My Position
I don’t see how that contributes to opensource:
- Who will stick his nose in the generated rust ? Yeah, maybe another model…
- Spreading illusions and good-enough is to me a surefire way to leave no room for innovating people by just steering attention apart from / minimizing their work. I guess by now everybody has met an executive telling him “so what? I can do that in 2 prompts” when presented some technical prowess.
BTW, I have no hard or soft feelings for adobe. I have stopped using their products ~ 14 years ago.