LightCraft

LightCraft is a free, open source photo library and raw developer from the ArtCraft team, built to work like Adobe Lightroom. You import your photos, sort and rate them, then develop them with sliders for light, colour and detail. Every edit is non-destructive, so your original files are never changed. It runs on Mac, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, and in a web browser.

What it can do

• Every edit is reversible. Exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, white balance, vibrance and tone curves never touch the original photo, and a high-precision pipeline keeps skies and shadows clean.
• Raw files from most cameras. Its own decoders read DNG, Canon CR2 and CR3, Sony ARW, Nikon NEF, Fujifilm RAF (including X-Trans), Panasonic, Pentax and Olympus files, plus JPEG, PNG, TIFF and WebP.
• Masks where you point. Brush, linear and radial gradients, and automatic Sky, Subject and Background selections for local edits.
• Cinematic colour grading. Tone shadows, midtones and highlights separately with colour wheels, or use the 8-band Color Mixer.
• Presets that start you off. Eighteen built-in looks such as Golden Hour, Teal & Orange and Faded Matte, each with an amount slider, plus your own.
• A tidy library. Albums in folders, star ratings, picks and rejects, and quick views by date or recently added.
• Before and after at a keystroke. Peek at the original, compare side by side or with a split view.
• Works with AI assistants. Every slider and tool is a command, so an assistant like Claude can cull, develop and export a shoot through MCP or the command line.

Part of the Crafting Apps

LightCraft is one of the Crafting Apps, a family of free, open source creative and office apps from ArtCraft, each a clean-room rebuild of a well-known paid app written from scratch in Rust. The best known is PhotoCraft, a Photoshop-style photo editor. They share the same approach: familiar menus and shortcuts, fast native apps on every major system, a version that runs in your browser, and commands an AI assistant can drive.

LightCraft, darktable, RawTherapee or Lightroom?

All four can organise and develop photos. The difference is how familiar they feel, how mature they are, and what they cost.

LightCraftThis page

Best forLightroom users who want a free, familiar alternative to try

Copies Lightroom's workflow and sliders and reads most raw formats with its own code. Fast and private, but only weeks old.

How mature

Alpha (2026)

Open source

Yes (MIT or Apache 2.0)

Cost

Free

darktable

Best forA free, proven raw editor for serious photographers

Mature and powerful, with a huge range of tools. Its layout and ideas differ from Lightroom's, so expect a learning curve.

How mature

Very mature

Open source

Yes (GPL 3.0)

Cost

Free

RRawTherapee

Best forSqueezing the most detail out of raw files

A long-running free raw developer known for excellent image quality. No photo library: you work folder by folder.

How mature

Very mature

Open source

Yes (GPL 3.0)

Cost

Free

Lightroom

Best forProfessional photographers today

Adobe's industry standard, with cloud sync, AI masks and mobile apps. Polished, but closed source and paid monthly.

How mature

Industry standard

Open source

No

Cost

Monthly subscription

A quick way to choose: need a dependable free raw editor today? Use darktable. Want maximum detail from single raw files? Try RawTherapee. Paid for by your job? Lightroom is still the safe choice. Know Lightroom and want something free that feels the same? Try LightCraft.

How to get it

• Easiest: download it from the LightCraft page on getartcraft.com, or from the latest release on GitHub.
• Every system: installers for Mac (Apple silicon and Intel), Windows (including ARM), Linux (AppImage, Flatpak, .deb, .rpm) and FreeBSD.
• In a browser: a web version runs the whole app in a modern browser, and you can host it yourself.
• For scripts and AI assistants: the lightcraft-cli tool runs the same commands without opening the app and includes an MCP server.

Good to know

• Alpha. LightCraft is in alpha. By its own team's estimate it's about 61% of the way to replacing Lightroom overall, and about 49% for a typical working photographer. These are the team's own estimates; nobody has tested them independently yet.
• Changing very fast. New versions arrive every few days, so expect bugs and update often.
• Built with AI help. The ArtCraft team uses AI coding agents heavily, which is how so much appeared so quickly. Test it on your own files before you rely on it.
• No Adobe code. It's a clean-room rebuild, written from public file specifications and by observing how Lightroom behaves, not from Adobe's code.
• Licence: MIT or Apache 2.0, your choice. Free to use, including at work. The ArtCraft and LightCraft names and logos have their own, stricter terms.