LightCraft: a free Lightroom alternative that never touches your originals

Which LightCraft are you looking for?

Three different things share this name. This page only covers the first one.

The two software products share a name and nothing else: different company, different audience, different file types.

What is LightCraft?

LightCraft is an open-source photo library and non-destructive RAW developer from ArtCraft, written from scratch in pure Rust. It is a desktop application first — macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD — with a WebAssembly build that runs in a browser. It is a free Lightroom alternative in the literal sense: a catalogue plus a RAW converter, not a subscription service.

"Non-destructive" is the design constraint, not a feature bullet. Adjustments are stored beside your files, the originals are never rewritten, and every slider is computed in a scene-referred, wide-gamut, 32-bit float pipeline before it reaches your screen. There is no account, no cloud tier and no telemetry — nothing leaves your machine unless you export it.

LightCraft at a glance

Developer	ArtCraft (Brandon Thomas + community)
Written in	Pure Rust, clean-room
Type	Photo library + non-destructive RAW developer
Platforms	macOS (universal) · Windows (x64, x86, ARM64) · Linux (x86_64, aarch64) · FreeBSD · Web (WebAssembly) · CLI
License	MIT OR Apache-2.0
Source	github.com/storytold/lightcraft — 13.7k stars, 153 contributors
Status	Stage: alpha
Account required	None
Price	Free, no subscription

How close is LightCraft to Lightroom?

You do not have to take a reviewer's word for it. ArtCraft maintains a public parity tracker that scores LightCraft against Adobe Lightroom Classic 15.5 and Lightroom 9.6, item by item, across 532 capabilities. These are the project's own numbers:

• 81.6% overall feature coverage of the 532-item checklist (P0 items 98.0%, P1 95.2%, P2 50.0%)
• ~77% coverage when weighted by how often each feature is actually used
• ~61% rated "ready for real work"
• ~65% of the way to serving an essentials user
• ~51% of the way to serving a mainstream practitioner

Six workflows already run end to end on macOS: import → cull → develop → save and reopen → batch looks → export. That is a full round trip, not a demo.

Read the last number seriously. At roughly half the way to a mainstream practitioner's expectations, LightCraft is not yet a drop-in replacement for someone who lives inside Lightroom's print, book and tethering workflow. It is a working developer with a real library, an import path and an honest tracker — which is a different and more useful claim.

What LightCraft can do today

A tone pipeline that behaves like film

Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks, plus edge-aware local tone mapping — a guided filter working on log-luminance. Pulling Highlights to −100 recovers a blown sky without the grey halo a naive curve leaves behind.

Colour work in a perceptual space

White balance by temperature and tint — Kelvin for RAW, relative for JPEG — with presets, an Auto option and a click-to-neutralise eyedropper. Vibrance that protects skin tones, Saturation, an 8-band Color Mixer (hue, saturation, luminance) and three-way Color Grading wheels with blending and balance. All of it is computed in OkLCh, so hue shifts stay perceptual rather than arithmetic.

Effects, without the plastic look

Texture for fine detail, Clarity for mid-tone punch, Dehaze built on a dark-channel prior with guided refinement (push it negative to add atmosphere), a post-crop Vignette with highlight priority, roundness and feather, and resolution-independent film grain with size and roughness.

Tone curves that cannot invert

A parametric region curve with movable splits, plus point curves for RGB, Red, Green and Blue. The curves are monotone by construction, so a mid-edit drag can never produce an accidental tone inversion — a common failure mode in curve implementations that nobody documents until it bites you.

Masking that follows what you point at

Paint with a brush (size, feather, flow, density, erase), drop linear and radial gradients with draggable pins, or select by Luminance Range, Color Range, Sky, Subject and Background. Combine components with Add, Subtract or Intersect, invert any of them, and use 17 local adjustments inside a single mask — temperature, tint, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, texture, clarity, dehaze, hue, saturation, sharpness, noise, moiré and defringe — plus an overall Amount. For a separate layer-based editor, see PhotoCraft’s masking tools.

Forty-one presets you can actually reuse

Forty-one hand-built presets ship in the box — Golden Hour, Teal & Orange, Faded Matte, Selenium Tone, Crisp Landscape and the rest — each with an Amount slider from 0 to 200 percent. Save your own from any group of settings, mark favourites, and copy, paste or sync edits across a whole selection, applying only the groups you choose.

Crop, straighten and geometry

Free or locked aspect ratios (1:1, 4:5, 5:7, 2:3, 4:3, 16:9, 16:10, original), drag-to-rotate straightening that always keeps the largest possible crop inside the frame, thirds, grid and golden-ratio overlays, flips and 90-degree rotations, and manual vertical, horizontal, rotate, aspect, scale and offset transforms.

Black and white with an eight-band mix

One keystroke to monochrome, then an 8-band B&W Mix to darken skies or make foliage glow, and the Color Grading wheels for selenium, sepia or split-tone prints.

A library that stays smooth past forty thousand photos

All Photos, Recently Added, Picks, By Date, Albums nested inside Folders, and Recently Deleted. Rate 0–5, flag with P, X or U, colour-label with 6–9. Search understands fields, not just words: rating:>3 flag:pick iso:>800 camera:x2 date:2026-04 keyword:mountains. The justified Photo Grid and Square Grid are virtualised, so scrolling stays smooth at forty photos or forty thousand. The People view groups named faces, including names read from XMP.

Contact sheets and print layouts

Select photos, then File → Contact Sheet PDF: A4 or Letter, landscape, rows and columns, and filename captions. You get a paginated PDF rendered at 150 dpi in sRGB, using your current edits. Limits are 1,000 photos, 100 pages and 256 MiB — this is a contact-sheet workflow, not a picture-package layout editor.

Built for agents, not just for hands

LightCraft ships with an MCP server and a control channel, so an agent can drive it end to end: import, apply edits, capture before/after screenshots and export. Every screenshot in the project's own README was captured that way. A CLI sits alongside the GUI for batch and headless work — the kind of automation that needs plug-ins or scripting in Lightroom.

Can I import my existing Lightroom catalogue?

Yes. Lightroom catalogue import landed on 8 October 2026 and is still being hardened — recent releases raised the catalogue and WAL size limit from 1 GiB to 4 GiB, added retries for XMP sidecar writes that failed, and fixed matching when a sidecar's extension differs in case. Your originals are not rewritten and no files are moved: the catalogue is read, and the edits live beside your photos as they always did.

This is the single feature that decides most migrations, so do not take our word for it. Point LightCraft at a copy of your catalogue first, check that your rated and flagged picks survived, open a few of your most-edited images and compare them side by side. If the results hold up on your own files, you have your answer — and if they do not, you have lost nothing but an hour.

Two things worth knowing before you start: XMP sidecars are read and written, so ratings, keywords and flags can round-trip with other tools; check the latest release notes before moving a working catalogue.

What LightCraft can't do yet

ArtCraft labels LightCraft "Stage: alpha — young and moving fast", and that label is accurate. These are the gaps that matter before you move a working catalogue across:

• The Classic output modules are barely started. Map, Book, Slideshow, Print, publish services and tethered capture sit at 10% ready and 15% coverage. If your workflow ends in a printed book or a tethered studio shoot, this is the blocker.
• No video at all. Video is at 0%.
• Plug-ins are thin. About 15% ready, 25% covered — anything you relied on as a Lightroom plug-in has no equivalent yet.
• No lens database. There is no lens profile database, so automatic distortion and vignette correction by lens does not exist yet.
• Colour is estimated, not measured. The project says its camera colour is estimated rather than measured, and its rendering is tuned by eye. On unusual bodies that shows up as colour you have to correct yourself.
• RAW coverage has two named holes. Compressed ORF and HE NEF currently open as previews, not full sensor data. Canon CR3 works on 26 verified bodies.
• The AI-assisted masks need a second download. Object and Describe masks use SAM 3, installed separately with its own model setup and terms. Subject, Sky and Background selections use classical heuristics and need no model. Masks already generated keep rendering and exporting even if you remove the model.
• Face recognition is also opt-in. No face-detection weights are bundled; install the models through Settings → Faces or the People view stays manual.
• The browser version is a build, not a hosted editor. The web target is a WebAssembly bundle you host yourself — there is no sign-in page where you edit photos in the cloud.
• No mobile apps and no cloud sync. macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, web and CLI only. There is no account and no shared library, so syncing two machines is your problem, not the app's.

Is LightCraft safe to install?

Judge it on what can be checked rather than on reassurance:

1. The source is public, all of it. Roughly three thousand commits and 153 contributors on GitHub, under MIT or Apache-2.0. Nothing about the build is hidden.
2. There is one official download path. Builds ship on GitHub Releases, the product page is getartcraft.com. Any other site offering a LightCraft installer is not distributing the project's builds.
3. It does not need the network to work. No account, no cloud tier, no telemetry, no subscription — editing is local by design.
4. Two features fetch models separately. The AI-assisted masks (SAM 3) and face recognition need models you install yourself, with their own setup and terms. That is a deliberate split: the base install carries no model weights.

Download and install LightCraft

Current release: 0.9.1. Pick your platform on the project's GitHub Releases page; every build is published there and nowhere else.

• macOS — universal build
• Windows — x64, x86 and ARM64
• Linux — x86_64 and aarch64
• FreeBSD
• Web — a WebAssembly bundle you host yourself
• CLI — ships alongside the GUI for batch and headless work

Open GitHub Releases Official product page

There is no installer account, no licence key and no trial. If a download asks you to sign in or pay, you are on the wrong site.

LightCraft vs Lightroom: where the line actually sits

Short version, from the project's own numbers: about 61% ready for real work overall, ~65% for an essentials user and ~51% for a mainstream practitioner, measured against Lightroom Classic 15.5. The round trip that matters already works — import, cull, develop, save and reopen, batch looks, export — and the parts that do not are concentrated rather than scattered.

Where LightCraft stands, according to ArtCraft's own parity tracker

Area	LightCraft	What it means in practice
Global develop, presets, export, merge	Available	Day-to-day editing is usable now
Masking	Available	Local adjustments work; expect rough edges
Remove, heal, Enhance	Limited	Do heavy retouching elsewhere
Plug-ins	~15%	Assume your plug-in has no equivalent
Classic output modules	10%	No Book, Print, Map, Slideshow, publish, tethering
Hardware integration	~40%	No display calibration, thin print profiles
Lens correction	no database	You correct distortion and vignette yourself
Video	0%	Unavailable in the parity tracker

Where the line sits. If your work ends in a screen export and you do not depend on plug-ins, LightCraft is already usable and the "free" part is real. If your work ends in a printed book, a tethered studio shoot or a delivery pipeline built on plug-ins, it is not a replacement yet — and no amount of marketing on this page would change that.

One comparison this page deliberately does not score: Darktable and RawTherapee. They are mature projects with different strengths, and scoring them here would only add another unverifiable table to the web. What can be said from LightCraft's own tracker is where it is weak — colour is estimated rather than measured, and there is no lens database — which is exactly where those projects have had years of head start. If colour fidelity on unusual bodies is your priority, test them side by side on your own files.

LightCraft FAQ

Related guides

• PhotoCraft: a free, open-source Photoshop alternative
• EffectCraft vs After Effects
• All ArtCraft apps compared

Author and editor: tushenmei · Last updated: 19 October 2026

The Crafting Apps

LightCraft is one of the apps from ArtCraft. The others cover video, design, audio and 3D.

• 01 PhotoCraft
• 02 VectorCraft
• 03 FilmCraft
• 04 LightCraft (this page)
• 05 PdfCraft
• 06 EffectCraft
• 07 DesignCraft
• 08 FigCraft
• 09 WordCraft
• 10 SoundCraft
• 11 DeckCraft
• 12 CADCraft
• 13 GridCraft