PhotoCraft v0.17.0: Art History Brush, Update and Restart, Camera Raw Calibration

PhotoCraft v0.17.0 came out on 28 October 2026, three days after v0.16.0. Its release notes list 145 merged pull requests from 58 contributors, 19 of them first-time contributors; Dependabot counts among both. Three of those entries are integration batches that merged 80 pull requests together (#9386, 37; #9775, 21; #9880, 22); 76 of them also have their own line, and counting both, 149 pull requests were merged. Four listed ones were reverted before the release, among them the optional local AI models (see below), and two had already shipped, in v0.12.0 and v0.16.0, and appear again only because small follow-ups landed on them. The README now counts 68 tools. The release brings the Art History Brush, the last Photoshop toolbar tool PhotoCraft lacked, an Update and Restart prompt, Camera Raw's Calibration panel, gradients on shapes and much better PSD and TIFF fidelity. PhotoCraft is still early alpha, so expect rough edges, and note that the v0.17.0 web build doesn't start (see Web build).

The release notes have no scorecard section. In docs/scorecard.md, Tools has 36 done and 9 partial items, the new partial one being the Art History Brush. File compatibility has 11 done, 14 partial and 2 missing, up from 9, 13 and 5: layered TIFF is done, painting a smart filter's mask is done, and raw sidecars and lossy DNG, and spot channels, moved from missing to partial. 12 of 181 preferences still do nothing, against 20 of 177, mostly because the Camera Raw Defaults and the Integrations settings now work. Twelve new performance scenarios are tracked but not run yet; the 3 within budget and 22 over are unchanged.

Highlights

• The Art History Brush. It sits in the History Brush flyout (Y) and paints stylised dabs from a history state, with Style, Area and Tolerance in the options bar. With it, no Photoshop toolbar tool is missing any more. It is marked partial: 8 of Photoshop's 10 styles (no Tight Curl Long or Loose Curl Long), Area changes spacing rather than coverage, it paints in Normal mode only, and there is no Opacity or pen pressure yet (#1610, merged through #9386). See /guides/tools.
• Update and Restart. When the check at start finds a newer release, a prompt offers Update and Restart, Download or Later; Help › Check for Updates… has the same button. The download is checked against the release's checksums, and the update won't start while a document has unsaved changes. How it installs depends on how PhotoCraft was installed: the macOS app, the Windows portable zip, the AppImage, .deb and .rpm packages and a plain .tar.gz copy replace themselves; FreeBSD gets the download link, Flatpak builds still don't check at all, and on Windows the MSI has a problem described under Breaking changes (#9322).
• Camera Raw Calibration, Auto and sidecars. Camera Raw gets a Calibration panel (shadow tint, and hue and saturation of the red, green and blue primaries) and an Auto button in the Light panel. A raw's .xmp sidecar fills the open dialog and is written back on Open, and every Preferences › Camera Raw Defaults setting now takes effect (#5128). Lossy DNGs, with floating-point raw data compressed as JPEG XL, open as raws instead of as their small embedded thumbnail (#8402), and most of the Camera Raw preview now develops on the GPU (#6923).
• Painting. The Mixer Brush shows the mixed paint while you drag, and the release keeps exactly what you saw (#3627). Clone Stamp, Pattern Stamp, History Brush, the Healing Brush and Paint Bucket get a Mode menu; Paint Bucket also has Clear (#5504). As in Photoshop, Shift+Alt (Shift+Option) plus a letter picks a blend mode, such as M for Multiply or S for Screen (#5478). See /guides/brushes.
• Gradients on shapes. The Fill and Stroke swatches of the shape tools offer No Color, Solid and Gradient, with a stops editor, presets, style, angle and scale, so any shape can have a gradient stroke (#7203).
• PSD fidelity. Type on a path from Photoshop opens on its path and is saved back into the file's text data, instead of turning into paragraph or point text (#8175). Frame layers keep their stroke (#5890). A document whose pixels add up to more than 2 GB but whose file is smaller is saved as PSD, not PSB (#5287). PSDs open without reading the whole file into memory first (#6583).
• History. Every document starts with a snapshot of itself as opened, and clicking it brings that state back. Alt-clicking the camera button opens New Snapshot with Name and From (#3567). History Options… adds Allow Non-Linear History and Make Layer Visibility Changes Undoable (#3535).
• Panels and the Histogram. The panels moved onto the shared docking of the Craft apps: on the desktop a floating panel opens in its own window, which can be moved outside the main one, except on Wayland, where it stays inside (#9366). The Histogram panel was rebuilt with Compact, Expanded and All Channels views, Luminosity and Colors, Source, statistics for a dragged range and a live overlay while an adjustment is open (#9139).

New tools and features

• Documents and artboards: File › New has an Artboards box, which makes the new document one artboard (#9258), and Layer › New › Artboard from Layers… takes a size of your own, such as 1080 × 1350 (#9262).
• Layers and channels: with two or more layers selected, the New Group button groups them, and Alt-click opens the New Group dialog; a new layer goes into an open group and joins its clipping group (#4329). Alpha channels can be dragged to reorder them in the Channels panel (#9168). A smart object's filter mask can be painted, filled and filtered directly, with undo (#3297).
• Vanishing Point: Ctrl/Cmd-drag a plane's edge to tear off a plane at 90°, and the Stamp tool clones in perspective with a live preview (#3281).
• Type: the font menu has favourites, recent fonts, class filters (Serif, Sans Serif, Script and others), Show Similar Fonts and a live preview (#6526). The Character panel has preset menus for size, leading and tracking (#3558). Type on a path follows its path when Direct Selection or the Pen reshapes it (#9321).
• Crop and transform: right-clicking a pending crop opens a menu with the presets, overlays, Cancel and Crop (#6620); X with a ratio preset turns the frame instead of shrinking it (#7058); Crop and Straighten Photos works on the selection only (#9298). Holding Ctrl/Cmd in Free Transform shows the distort and skew cursors (#5405), and its W/H readout uses the ruler unit (#9678).
• Interface: Preferences › Interface › UI Scale adds 105, 110, 115 and 120% (#3316). Image Processor, Batch, Lens Correction, Contact Sheet and Create Droplet have Browse… for their folders (#9360). In the Filter Gallery, Ctrl/⌘ with +, − and 0 zooms the preview (#9107). Wheel zoom eases between notches again, following Preferences › General › Animated Zoom (#5547). The Color panel's cube modes warn when a colour can't print (#9154).
• Speed: saving a 36 MP document is about 38% faster as .pcraft and 24% faster as PSD, with the same bytes (#9877). Expand, Contract and Border work only around the selection, up to about 40 times faster for a small one on a large canvas (#9697). Content-Aware Scale is 1.65 to 3.6 times faster with the same output (#5236). Large brush tips paint on several cores (#7218), deflate goes through zlib-rs (#7689), and on Linux with NVIDIA's driver, documents with many layers stay on the GPU (#9042).

File formats

• PSD: spot channels are stored as Photoshop stores them, and PSDs from earlier PhotoCraft versions keep their ink (#8885). Photoshop's MTrn merged-transparency marker is recognised (#8877). Halftone Pattern smart filters survive a save (#9031), and a Color Lookup layer keeps a .3dl or .look file as loaded (#6723).
• TIFF: alpha and spot channels are written and read as TIFF extra samples, up to 16, with their names, colours and solidity (#7415, #8878). Layered TIFFs get the global layer mask block Photoshop needs to open their layers, not only the composite, and type layers are written in the byte order Photoshop uses (#9148, #9128).
• Raw: besides lossy DNG, raw decoding is faster: in the batch's tests, CR2 lossless JPEG went from 77 to 57 ms and uncompressed DNG from 45 to 25 ms (#9449, #9451, #9452, #9386). A DNG with an invalid black level no longer crashes (#9446).
• Other formats: Amiga IFF can now be saved, as 24-bit ILBM (#9080); DDS export keeps the alpha channel (#8776); UTF-16 LUT files and .look and .3dl edge cases load (#9129, #9210, #9215). Save As lists every format PhotoCraft writes (#3609), and Batch folder sources take every format it opens (#9097).

What opens and saves where: /guides/file-formats.

Languages

The official builds still include 22 interface languages. Most catalogs gained 60 to 80 rows for the new tools and dialogs; Hindi stays partial. The new update prompt itself is in English only. See /guides/language.

Automation (CLI & MCP)

• New commands and parameters: paint.artHistoryBrush (#1610), artboard on file.new (#9258), width and height on layer.new.artboardFromLayers (#9262), history.options (#3535), mode on paint.bucket (#5504) and "target": "filterMask" for painting, fills and filters (#3297). paint.stroke with fill: true fills the enclosed region (#3779).
• Preferences › Integrations › Allow Agent Control and Control Port now take effect at launch: a Control Port opens the control channel without --control, and with Allow Agent Control off, --control is refused with a message (#4097).
• The control channel refuses Windows device names in request paths and won't replace a non-image file in its write root (#9425, #9445). Actions save and read the Lab Lightness channel as Photoshop's Lght (#9385). More on actions: /guides/actions.

Setup and examples: /guides/mcp-cli.

Web build

The online editor on this site stays on the v0.16.0 web build, because the v0.17.0 one doesn't start. Its app/photocraft-web.js imports ./snippets/…/inline0.js, but the zip has the snippets folder at its root, not in app/, so the browser gets a 404 and stays on "Loading PhotoCraft…". This is tracked in #10491, #10590 and #10092, all still open, and v0.18.0 has the same problem; the fix, #10248, isn't merged yet.

• The release zip is 12,955,028 bytes (12.4 MiB), up from v0.16.0's 12,192,545. The app is one gzipped part, app/photocraft-web-*.part-aa, of 12,851,309 bytes (12.3 MiB); unpacked, it is 28,982,124 bytes (27.6 MiB), up from 26,454,256.
• The update prompt is desktop only; the browser has no update check.
• Chinese, Japanese and Korean text still shows as empty boxes in the web build (#1615, still open).

Self-hosting notes are on /download/web.

Fixes and stability

• Editing: pixels copied from another document are pasted centred, not at their old position (#9353); a pasted SVG drawing copied as text pastes its pixels (#7154); Image Rotation › Arbitrary turns unlinked layer masks (#9203); Reveal All ignores erased, fully transparent pixels (#9380); making a selection from a path deselects the path (#6353); defined and imported patterns survive a restart (#9318).
• Painting and filters: hard-round presets no longer show stacked tip outlines (#8846); the Remove tool's trail covers everything a stroke removes (#8923); Dehaze leaves no bright halo beside dark objects (#9316); Content-Aware Fill on a crop keeps pixels a non-deleting crop hid (#8179).
• Interface: a swatch click recolours selected type and shapes with any tool (#9253); Bevel & Emboss has separate Highlight and Shadow Mode menus again (#9370); Space no longer opens File › New after Alt+zoom (#8679); Select and Mask starts from its defaults unless Remember Settings is on (#9444); the CPU pixel grid is thin on HiDPI screens (#9199).
• The interface toolkit moved to egui 0.37, with Chinese, Japanese and Korean fallback fonts still chosen by locale on the desktop (#9363, #9518).
• Security: .pcraft manifests with too many values, image headers larger than the file, deeply nested XML and SVG, and malformed plug-in manifests are refused instead of exhausting memory or crashing (#8893, #8704, #9421, #9398, #9442, #9680). The Windows signing client is pinned and verified (#3938).

More known problems and fixes: /guides/troubleshooting.

Breaking changes or things to know

• No local AI models. The release notes list "Add optional local models" (#1199), but it was reverted before the release; the maintainers want local models to go through a separate integration. None of its code is in v0.17.0, so no build, official or self-made, has a model download in Preferences. Select Subject and Remove Background work as in v0.16.0; see /guides/remove-background. Three other listed pull requests were reverted too: Animation Effects following the system setting (#4573), .cube files with a 1D shaper (#9183) and a raw preview helper nothing used yet (#9454).
• Update and Restart on Windows MSI installs. The update library recognises an MSI copy only in a folder the v0.17.0 installer doesn't use, so it handles an MSI copy like a portable folder. An open report says that on Windows, Update and Restart restarts PhotoCraft without installing anything and then offers the update again (#10477). If that happens, download the new MSI from /download/windows.
• The Windows installer asks who it is for. New installs default to Only for me, under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\ArtCraft\PhotoCraft, with no administrator prompt; Everyone installs under Program Files\ArtCraft\PhotoCraft. An update keeps the existing copy's folder and scope, and changing scope means uninstalling first (#9756).
• Panel layouts start from the default once. A layout saved by an earlier version opens as the default layout the first time; every panel stays reachable from Window (#9366).
• New Group groups the selection. With two or more layers selected, a plain click on the New Group button now groups them, and groups made from layers start collapsed (#4329).
• The web build doesn't start, as described above. Keep using v0.16.0 for self-hosting until a fixed build is out.
• No FreeBSD aarch64 build (craft-common-actions#39, still open). FreeBSD x86_64 is there.
• Windows 7 and 8: PhotoCraft still needs Windows 10 or later.

How to update

Download the v0.17.0 build for your system from /download: Windows, macOS or Linux. The release has the same 28 files as v0.16.0, with SHA256SUMS.txt to check them against, but its web build doesn't start. v0.18.0 followed on 31 October, so you may want that one instead; see the v0.18.0 notes. Builds come only from the official GitHub release; avoid third-party mirrors. If you are coming from v0.15.1 or earlier, also read the v0.16.0 notes.

Full release notes, with every merged pull request: PhotoCraft v0.17.0 on GitHub.