Someone Rebuilt Free, Open-Source Versions of Photoshop, Premiere, and Lightroom Using AI

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kac77

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Yeah and they're completely busted piles of shit as it stands.

Like the dude vibe coded so hard he didn't even realize that parts of the UI still said Photoshop. He obviously just threw pictures of the UI at an LLM, said "reimplement this," and checked nothing before he shoved it out the door.
 
socK said:
Yeah and they're completely busted piles of shit as it stands.

Like the dude vibe coded so hard he didn't even realize that parts of the UI still said Photoshop. He obviously just threw pictures of the UI at an LLM, said "reimplement this," and checked nothing before he shoved it out the door.
Click to expand...
See you in court.
 
I heard there was some jank, but some stuff was actually functional functional. I think it was stupid to copy the looks, but functionality is the part that is important here. A lot of IP protection in software isn't from legal protection, but from trade secrets of what makes the IP work.
 
socK said:
Yeah and they're completely busted piles of shit as it stands.

Like the dude vibe coded so hard he didn't even realize that parts of the UI still said Photoshop. He obviously just threw pictures of the UI at an LLM, said "reimplement this," and checked nothing before he shoved it out the door.
Click to expand...
Also the thing that makes the Adobe products worth it is not that nothing else does what they do. You can find replacements to them, often very well coded replacements that have been around a long time. Other than inertia/first mover privilege there are a few things that keep people on Adobe, none of which vibe coded slop is going to solve:

  1. A very goof UX/UI and workflow. Their programs are seriously intuitive to use. I really understood that fully when I introduced my mom, who's an artist and art teacher but not tech savvy, to Photoshop and she was able to dive in and use it. It is designed to work how artists think. Many other programs (GIMP being the most egregious) are not. That only comes from a lot of design and testing.
  2. Great documentation. This was also something mom really went on about, particularly being an educator, was how the docs were extremely well written, didn't skip steps, explained everything well, etc.
  3. Application interoperability. This one matters in pro houses. All their programs are tightly integrated and work well together. They aren't a bunch of discrete apps that you play with, they are all part of an ecosystem.
  4. Support for the kinds of things professionals need. Things like RAW photo editing, HDR workflows, full pipeline color calibration, etc, etc. There are plenty of features that most people would say "Who cares?" but various pros need them, and Adobe has them.

So ya, I'm going to have to press X to doubt that some vibe coded shit matches that. It might look superficially similar and do some of the basic tasks... but that doesn't help. If all you need are programs that do the basics... well go get one. For most people my go-to is Paint.net. It's a basic image editor. For the vast majority of people, it'll do anything you need Photoshop for.
 
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Sycraft said:
Also the thing that makes the Adobe products worth it is not that nothing else does what they do. You can find replacements to them, often very well coded replacements that have been around a long time. Other than inertia/first mover privilege there are a few things that keep people on Adobe, none of which vibe coded slop is going to solve:

  1. A very goof UX/UI and workflow. Their programs are seriously intuitive to use. I really understood that fully when I introduced my mom, who's an artist and art teacher but not tech savvy, to Photoshop and she was able to dive in and use it. It is designed to work how artists think. Many other programs (GIMP being the most egregious) are not. That only comes from a lot of design and testing.
  2. Great documentation. This was also something mom really went on about, particularly being an educator, was how the docs were extremely well written, didn't skip steps, explained everything well, etc.
  3. Application interoperability. This one matters in pro houses. All their programs are tightly integrated and work well together. They aren't a bunch of discrete apps that you play with, they are all part of an ecosystem.
  4. Support for the kinds of things professionals need. Things like RAW photo editing, HDR workflows, full pipeline color calibration, etc, etc. There are plenty of features that most people would say "Who cares?" but various pros need them, and Adobe has them.

So ya, I'm going to have to press X to doubt that some vibe coded shit matches that. It might look superficially similar and do some of the basic tasks... but that doesn't help. If all you need are programs that do the basics... well go get one. For most people my go-to is Paint.net. It's a basic image editor. For the vast majority of people, it'll do anything you need Photoshop for.
Click to expand...

My first thought when I saw the topic was that we've had alternatives to Photoshop for decades. 99% of the world doesn't need Photoshop because the basics do the job. And, these days with AI, people aren't even going to learn the basics anymore because they'll just feed the image into AI to fix whatever they want fixed. If you actually need the full capabilities of the Adobe suite of products you're not going to settle for some vibe coded janky shit.
 
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