PhotoSplice

A desktop image editor faithfully replicating classic Adobe Photoshop with 1:1 native PSD/PSB compatibility.
Live WebApp at https://photosplice.com/web

Downloads • Screenshots • What this is • Features • File formats • Building • Licences

PhotoSplice is built upon PhotoCraft, as an open-source Rust image-editing engine (MIT OR Apache-2.0). Its main focus areas are compatibility, simplicity and speed. Featuring full PSD round-trip between Photoshop and PhotoSplice, classic Photoshop 'feel' (circa version CS6), and GPU optimisation for all Operating Systems. PhotoSplice's cleaner and leaner interface, full PSD and PDF reader and writer, and comprehensive EXR/HDR tools and features on top.

Installers are on the Releases page.

On Linux, pick the package for your distribution (<version> and <arch> as in the file name):

sudo apt install ./photosplice-<version>-linux-<arch>.deb          # Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!_OS
sudo dnf install ./photosplice-<version>-linux-<arch>.rpm          # Fedora, RHEL (openSUSE: zypper install)
sudo pacman -U photosplice-<version>-linux-<arch>.pkg.tar.zst      # Arch Linux, Manjaro, EndeavourOS
flatpak install --user photosplice-<version>-linux-x86_64.flatpak  # any distribution with Flatpak

The AppImage needs no installation (chmod +x it and run it) and carries update information, so AppImageUpdate fetches only what changed in a new release.

Click any image for the full-resolution version.

Start screen & New Project	Layer Style	Camera RAW develop
Lens Correction	Filter Gallery	Adjustments menu

PhotoSplice is a full-featured desktop raster and vector graphics editor designed with fidelity in mind rather than reinterpretation. Panels sit where you expect them, shortcuts match your muscle memory, dialogs expose identical fields, and tools behave exactly like the originals, right down to modifier keys. If you know Photoshop ~CS6, you already know PhotoSplice.

• PSD/PSB Native Format: PSD is the native format, not a lossy import filter. Documents round-trip cleanly through the binary format: layer records, masks, blending modes, channel data, descriptors, layer effects, smart-filter stacks, text engine data, vector paths, slices, and colour profiles. A file saved in PhotoSplice opens in Photoshop with its layer tree intact, and vice versa. PSB is supported for large documents.

• Native. egui on wgpu (Metal, Vulkan, DirectX 12), with a CPU fallback. No Electron, no web view, no JavaScript.
• Local and private. No account, no telemetry, no cloud. Your files stay on your machine.
• Scriptable. Every action is a command, the same ones the menus run, so a JSON control channel can do anything the interface can.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Adobe. Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Inc., named here only to describe the interface and behaviour PhotoSplice follows. PhotoSplice is independent of, and not endorsed by, the PhotoCraft project.

Gimp. Or Affinity. I'm certain they have great features, but my goal is not to make a mega-app with a billion functions (however, feel free to create any plugins you want!) - but to offer graphic designers a legal way to edit PSDs for free.

Documents and layers

• Pixel, type, shape, fill and adjustment layers; groups, clipping masks, layer masks and vector masks; all of Photoshop's blend modes.
• Layer styles: Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer and Inner Glow, Bevel & Emboss, Satin, Color, Gradient and Pattern Overlay, Stroke.
• Smart Objects (embedded and linked) with Smart Filters.
• 8, 16 and 32-bit documents in RGB, Grayscale, CMYK and Lab, with its own ICC colour management engine.

Tools

• Marquee, Lasso, Polygonal and Magnetic Lasso, Magic Wand, Quick and Object Selection, Select Subject, Select and Mask.
• Brush, Pencil, Eraser, Clone Stamp, Healing, Gradient (live and classic), Paint Bucket, Dodge, Burn, Sponge, Blur, Sharpen, Smudge.
• Pen and shape tools, custom shapes, Type (point, paragraph, on a path, warped), Crop, Ruler, Hand, Zoom, Eyedropper.

Adjustments and filters

• Adjustment layers and Image › Adjustments, including Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation and Color Lookup (3D LUTs, and ICC abstract and device-link profiles).
• Camera Raw: develop raw files and use it as a filter.
• Lens Correction with measured lens profiles from the Lensfun database.
• Liquify, Puppet Warp, Perspective Warp, Vanishing Point, Content-Aware Fill and Scale, the Filter Gallery and the classic filter menus.

Automation and integration

• Actions, Batch and script events.
• A JSON control channel (see docs/control-protocol.md).
• Sandboxed WebAssembly filter plug-ins (docs/plugins.md).
• Native menus on macOS, six themes, adjustable UI font size, and 38 interface languages.

Bundled libraries: Color Lookup presets, gradients, brushes, patterns and custom shapes, each under its own licence (see Licences).

Rust stable (1.90 or later). Linux also needs libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev libx11-dev libxrandr-dev libxi-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libgtk-3-dev.

cargo run --release -p photosplice      # the desktop app
cargo test --workspace                 # the tests
scripts/dev-macos.sh some/file.psd     # macOS: fast development build, opening a file

Installers are built by the scripts in packaging/ (the same ones CI runs). docs/development.md covers profiles, debugging and the test corpora; docs/architecture.md explains how the code is organised, and docs/contributing.md the rules for changes.

PhotoSplice is licensed under either of the MIT licence or the Apache License 2.0, at your option. NOTICE carries the required attributions, including PhotoCraft's.

It bundles third-party material under its own licences, each with its licence file beside it. THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md lists them file by file.

The Rust crates PhotoSplice links (egui, wgpu, hayro and many more) are under their own permissive licences, listed with their texts in THIRD-PARTY-CRATES.md.