Serika PhotoEdit 0.0.2

Added

• AI background removal and subject selection on this computer: BiRefNet (MIT) through ONNX Runtime, loaded only when present, with DirectML GPU acceleration when that runtime is installed. Preferences › AI picks the engine, shows its status and downloads the model with checksum verification.
• A low-resource Fast engine remains the default; Select › Subject (AI), Layer › Remove Background and Layer › Remove Background (AI) choose explicitly.
• Live MCP sessions: SerikaPhotoEdit --mcp --attach --mcp-root <folder> lets AI agents edit the documents open in the window, with every change on screen and in the undo history. Serika starts if it is not running, the title bar shows when an agent is connected, and Preferences › AI can turn agent access off.
• MCP protocol 2026-07-28 (stateless requests, server/discover, cache hints, version errors) alongside the 2025 handshake for existing clients.
• MCP tools for subject selection, background removal, layer masks, image placement, duplicating, deleting, grouping and restacking layers, single-layer previews, history, AI status and a documented action catalog.
• Photoshop-style Layers panel: an eye column (click, drag down to toggle many, Alt-click to solo), lock and footer icons, folder icons for groups, checkerboard thumbnails and a type glyph for text layers.
• Adjustments panel icons for the sixteen Photoshop adjustments, with the rest under More adjustments.
• Redrawn tool icons with a distinct glyph for every tool and Photoshop's corner triangle on toolbar slots that hold several tools, plus overlapping foreground/background colour chips.
• Optional GPU (OpenGL 3.3) adjustments and Gaussian blur with CPU fallback, a persistent preference and device diagnostics.
• LittleCMS ICC CMYK soft proofing, intents and black point compensation, paper simulation, gamut warnings, and 8/16-bit CMYK TIFF and ink separations. Layer editing remains RGB.
• Editable mixed typography, paragraph metrics, text on paths and shared render/outline layout.
• Native stdio MCP server with workspace access controls, isolated documents, previews, layers, native saves, atomic actions and undo/redo.
• Home screen featuring the PhotoEdit mascot, with matching Windows, Linux and macOS application icons.
• Multi-layer alignment, distribution, grouping, duplication, deletion and stack ordering, with stable selections and undo.
• Editable embedded Smart Object documents, linked placement/reload/relink, replacement and export, with retained transforms, masks and Smart Filters.
• Brush dynamics, deterministic stroke spacing, pressure/tilt controls, stroke previews and Serika brush preset import/export.
• Draggable RGB and per-channel Curves, histogram overlays, numeric point editing and curve presets.
• Pattern Fill layers and five gradient styles with multiple colour/opacity stops, plus an editable Gradient Map ramp.
• MCP layout tools for precise designs: text laid out in a box (wrapped or kept line by line, aligned by its ink and centred optically, optionally shrunk to fit), measure_text, align_layers, check_layout and full-resolution region previews, plus layout rules in the server instructions. inspect_document reports every layer's ink bounds, and text layers can be restyled.
• Super resolution like Photoshop's: Image › Super Resolution enlarges the whole document and Layer › Upscale Layer enlarges one layer about its centre, with AI (Real-ESRGAN General x4v3 or x4plus, BSD-3, run locally through ONNX Runtime on 128 px tiles, cancellable with progress) or Preserve Details (Lanczos-3 with edge sharpening, instant). Preferences › AI downloads and verifies either model.
• MCP upscale_layer and upscale_document, place_image resample (smooth, preserve-details, ai) and replace_layer_id to re-render a placed image in place (keeping its mask and stacking), upscale models in ai_status, and a warning when an image is enlarged with plain smoothing.
• serika_iconsheet and serika_psdcheck developer tools, scripts/psd_inspect.py and scripts/release.py.

Changed

• Preferences redesigned: a searchable sidebar with icons, settings grouped into cards with descriptions, on/off switches, live theme previews, model and runtime status badges, and Restore Defaults. Placeholder pages and settings that had no effect were removed.
• ONNX Runtime is shared by every AI feature, so subject selection and super resolution load it once.
• Select subject / Remove background / Add mask is a floating bar near the bottom of the canvas and is off by default (View › Contextual Task Bar).
• Essentials uses Photoshop's three panel stacks, with Properties as a tab beside Adjustments, so Layers keeps its room on short screens. Workspace layouts saved by earlier builds are reset once.
• Icons are drawn as vectors at the display's scale, so they stay sharp at 125 % and 150 %.
• The PSD import report lists only features imported as pixels, once per layer, instead of every preserved metadata block.
• Serika brand refresh: violet accents, plum and lavender surfaces, and bundled Outfit and Onest typefaces across all four themes, with visible keyboard focus and neutral image surrounds.
• Multi-layer Move and keyboard nudging preserve selections and unlinked masks, with gesture cancellation and atomic undo.
• The version is defined once in CMake and generated into the application.

Fixed

• PSD files from Photoshop opened upside down with empty groups, because layer records were read top-to-bottom; PSDs saved by Serika had the mirror-image problem in Photoshop. Files saved by earlier Serika builds still open correctly.
• Hidden layers could not be shown again: the dark theme drew nothing for an unchecked visibility box.
• Dragging layers in the Layers panel could reorder unpredictably or nest layers inside non-group layers.
• Remove Background used the whole document instead of the target layer, so a placed photo kept its background.
• The Adjustments panel's two-letter labels were ambiguous (three buttons read "Au").
• Editing documents with many layers was very slow: every change re-rendered each layer through full-canvas images. Plain, masked and text layers and full-strength pass-through groups now render directly, with identical pixels; a 63-layer cover dropped from about 5 seconds to 0.3 seconds per change.
• Adding to, subtracting from or intersecting a selection on a large document took about a second per operation; long MCP action lists froze the window until Windows closed it as not responding.
• MCP place_image ignored a single width or height instead of scaling proportionally.
• The History states preference only applied to documents that were already open.

Serika PhotoEdit 0.0.1

Serika PhotoEdit 0.0.1

Initial public release — 8 October 2026

Serika PhotoEdit is an open-source C++20/Qt Widgets photo editor with layered editing, masks, high-precision RGB and familiar Photoshop-style keyboard controls. Application code and original Serika icons are MIT licensed; bundled libraries retain their own licenses.

This is an early release with useful working workflows and documented limits. It does not provide full Photoshop parity.

Downloads

• Windows x64 portable ZIP
• Windows x64 MSI installer
• macOS Intel: DMG · ZIP
• macOS Apple Silicon: DMG · ZIP
• Linux x86_64: AppImage · tar.gz · DEB
• Linux aarch64: AppImage · tar.gz · DEB
• Source ZIP and source tarball
• SHA-256 checksums
• Supplemental AppImage runtime dependency notices

Extract the whole portable archive, then run bin/SerikaPhotoEdit.exe. The runtime libraries are included. The MSI includes an optional SPE/PSD/PSB file-association feature. Both the executable and installer are unsigned.

See the live release page for current download availability and the live validation record for completed package checks. Additional platform packages extend this existing release using unchanged v0.0.1 application source with current packaging scripts, documentation and notices; the application tag and version are unchanged.

macOS: choose Intel or Apple Silicon, drag the app from the DMG to Applications, or extract the ZIP. The verified bundle minimums are macOS 15.0 for Intel and 14.0 for Apple Silicon, also recorded in each app's dependency manifest. Bundles include Qt/application libraries and use an ad-hoc signature, without Developer ID signing or notarization. First launch may require approval under System Settings → Privacy & Security; see Apple's instructions.

Linux: target Ubuntu 24.04/glibc 2.39 or newer on the matching architecture. Make the AppImage executable and run it; without FUSE, use --appimage-extract-and-run. Alternatively, extract the tar.gz and use its top-level SerikaPhotoEdit launcher, or install the DEB with sudo apt install ./SerikaPhotoEdit-0.0.1-linux-amd64.deb (use arm64 for ARM). Qt/application dependencies are bundled; glibc, graphics drivers, a desktop session and fonts remain host requirements. Other distributions are unverified.

Windows 11 x64 has native application and package validation. Earlier CI also built and passed offscreen tests on Windows Server 2022, macOS 14 and Ubuntu 24.04; those checks do not establish full interactive native acceptance. Windows ARM64 and other OS versions remain unverified.

Included workflows

• Native document tabs, detachable windows, dockable panels, workspaces, command palette, four themes and original Serika artwork.
• 8-bit, 16-bit and float RGB layers and selections; copy-on-write history; groups, adjustments, effects, text/shapes and smart objects.
• Raster/vector masks with density, feather and linking; Select and Mask previews, edge brushing and output modes; saved selections and layer comps.
• Brush/eraser, clone/heal, fill/gradient, selections, paths/text/shapes, Liquify, guides/rulers and zoom/pan.
• Preview-first crop and perspective crop, ratios, output dimensions, overlays, straighten and automatic transparent/uniform-border bounds detection.
• Inline Free Transform, scale, rotation, affine skew and projective distort/perspective; selected-mask transforms; Patch and Content-Aware Move with transported pixels.
• Photoshop-style shortcuts with remapping, conflict detection, tool scopes/cycles, held modifiers and JSON import/export.
• SPE/SPEB saving, original PSD/PSB import/export, LibRaw RAW Develop, raster/TGA/HDR/SVG and PDF page imports.
• Retained-source smart-filter stacks, selectable History Brush sources, Fade, action playback and headless batch processing.

Use SPE as the master format for layered work. PSD/PSB compatibility uses raster fallback layers and private Serika tags for some editable data; it does not guarantee lossless interchange with another editor.

Validation

The Windows 11 x64 Release build used Qt 6.8.3, MinGW GCC 13.1, LibRaw 0.22.2 and zlib 1.3.1. Compiler warnings were treated as errors. All eight CTest suites passed with no failures or skips:

Suite	Passing QtTest checks
Core/document/compositor	79
I/O/formats	37
UI	8
Canvas/tools	34
Actions	13
Shortcuts	14
Masks	21
Integrated workflows	21
Total	227

These counts include QtTest lifecycle slots and data-driven rows. They are checks from the eight suites, not 227 independent acceptance scenarios.

Validation also exercised native UI screenshots, a portable GUI launch with development tools removed from PATH, a headless resize/invert/SPE batch and reopening its output. The ZIP passed required-file inventory and CRC checks. WiX generated the x64 MSI, administrative extraction succeeded, and the extracted executable launched. Normal MSI installation, association changes and uninstall have not been exercised; CPack's WiX template also emits upgrade/shortcut ICE warnings.

See the current validation record for the exact scope and performance measurements for the tested Windows CPU scenario.

Earlier GitHub Actions passed builds, offscreen tests and runtime staging on Windows Server 2022, macOS 14 and Ubuntu 24.04. Additional native Linux x86_64/aarch64 and macOS Intel/Apple Silicon package results are maintained in the live validation record, including build, package-launch, dependency, batch and screenshot evidence. Documentation bundled in a download is a packaging-time snapshot; the live record is authoritative for checks completed afterwards.

The final Linux x86_64 and aarch64 jobs each passed all 227 checks without failures or skips, then produced tar.gz, AppImage and DEB packages and passed their package smoke checks. This includes batch save/reopen, screenshots, an XCB launch under Xvfb, extracted archive/DEB launches and AppImage extraction-mode execution.

The final Apple Silicon and Intel jobs each passed all 227 checks without failures or skips. Both architectures' ZIP and DMG packages passed native batch save/reopen and Cocoa screenshot checks with the build Qt kit and Homebrew Cellar hidden. Strict signature verification, architecture/dependency audits and minimum OS checks passed. Their DMG editor screenshots were visually inspected.

Known limits

• No full Photoshop parity: specialist features and some tool algorithms are simplified.
• Content-aware operations use local CPU methods, without a trained semantic subject/fill model.
• Embedded smart-object subdocuments, comprehensive Adobe descriptors, advanced typography and multi-layer/group transforms remain incomplete.
• CMYK/Lab editing, professional ICC/proof workflows and GPU acceleration are limited or absent.
• Many operations allocate full images; the tiled model is not an out-of-core editor, and canvas creation is capped at 80 million pixels.
• Large external PSD/PSB files, camera-by-camera RAW coverage, tablets, mixed-DPI displays and full interactive native behavior outside Windows 11 require further validation.
• Normal DEB installation/uninstallation, Developer ID signing/notarization, universal Mac binaries and other Linux distributions remain unverified.

Details are in [current implementation status](https://github.com/serika-dev/Se...