LightCraft · Alternative to Lightroom
LightCraft: Free, Open-Source Lightroom Alternative
LightCraft is an open-source, clean-room photo library and raw developer in pure Rust that follows the Adobe Lightroom workflow.
- Early alpha
- v0.6.0 · October 11, 2026
- GitHub ★ 9.7k
- MIT / Apache-2.0
What LightCraft does
Non-destructive develop
Light, Color, Effects, Tone Curve, Color Mixer and Color Grading sliders render through a scene-referred, wide-gamut, 32-bit float pipeline.
Masking
Brush, linear and radial gradients, luminance and colour range, Sky, Subject and Background masks, combined with add, subtract and intersect.
Library and culling
Albums, folders, smart albums, stacks, ratings, flags, labels, field-aware search, and Compare and Survey views with instant previews.
Own RAW decoders
Its own pure-Rust decoders for DNG, Canon CR2/CR3, Sony ARW, Nikon NEF, Fujifilm RAF (including X-Trans), Panasonic RW2, Pentax PEF and Olympus ORF.
GPU-accelerated, CPU-exact
The develop pipeline runs as wgpu compute kernels checked against the CPU within 1/255; the README cites ~4 ms slider updates on a 24 MP raw.
Local-first and private
No account, cloud, telemetry or subscription; the catalog is an append-only log of human-readable operations you can diff, back up or replay.
File formats
- DNG, CR2, CR3, ARW, NEF, RAF, RW2/RWL, PEF, ORF, SRW (read; some variants preview only)
- JPEG, PNG, TIFF, WebP, JPEG XL (read)
- PSD composite (read)
- HEIC/HEIF (read; optional build feature)
- JPEG/PNG/TIFF/WebP/AVIF/DNG (export)
- XMP sidecars (read/write)
- Contact sheet PDF (export)
How mature is it?
Alpha, "young and moving fast": about 81% of Lightroom by feature count, but nearer 61% as a day-to-day replacement (~49% for a typical working photographer, ~64% for casual use).
Biggest gaps
- Camera colour calibration: several brands use estimated profiles; measured calibration is missing.
- Compressed Olympus raws and some CR3 variants open only as embedded JPEG previews.
- AI masks and denoise: subject and sky selection are classical heuristics for now.
- On-screen HDR display, video, and the Classic Print, Book and Map modules.
Automation and AI agents
Every action is a command reachable from the UI, lightcraft-cli, a JSON-lines control channel and an MCP server that runs headless or attached to the live app.