LightCraft

LightCraft is a photo library and raw developer that rebuilds the Adobe Lightroom workflow — import, cull, develop, export — as a free, open-source, pure-Rust desktop app from the ArtCraft team. Like its siblings it is a clean-room project, built from Lightroom's documented behaviour with a row-by-row parity tracker published in docs/parity.md.

The develop module covers the core Lightroom panel set: exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks with edge-aware local tone mapping; Kelvin-based white balance; texture, clarity and dehaze; colour grading with presets, profiles and the colour mixer; and directed masking. It decodes RAW files with its own decoders — DNG plus Canon CR2, Sony ARW, Nikon NEF, Fujifilm RAF including X-Trans and more — works scene-referred in linear Rec.2020, and runs the whole pipeline as wgpu compute kernels on Metal, Vulkan and DirectX 12. Culling is fast by design: a raw file shows its embedded camera preview within about 0.1 seconds while the full render happens in background workers.

LightCraft is local-first: no account, no cloud, no telemetry, no subscription — the catalog is an append-only log of plain JSON. Ratings (0–5 stars), flags, folders and recently deleted give you library management, and before/after views plus keyboard-first navigation keep culling quick. Agents get first-class support: lightcraft-cli exposes about a hundred engine commands, ~100 MCP tools for Claude and other clients, and undo applies even to scripted bursts of edits.