PhotoCraft v0.18.0: Arabic, four Nordic languages and a Select and Mask workspace

PhotoCraft v0.18.0 came out on 31 October 2026, three days after v0.17.0. Its release notes list 176 merged pull requests from 73 contributors, 16 of them first-time contributors. Five of those entries took in other pull requests together: three integration batches (#9166, 24; #10157, 16; #10204, 87) and two that combined the community translation catalogs for Arabic (#10006, 7) and for the Nordic languages (#10021, 7). 127 of those pull requests also have their own line. The list overstates the release, though. 19 listed entries were taken back out of #10204 before it merged, and a follow-up, #10328, reverted three more and removed the Liquify tool a fourth gave a new icon, so none of their code is in v0.18.0. Five more listed entries, and five of #9166's pull requests, had already shipped in earlier versions; they aren't repeated here. Counting the seven pull requests that went in only through a batch, about 155 are new in this release. The README counts 68 tools, as in v0.17.0.

The biggest change is the interface languages: Arabic, the first right-to-left one, and Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål, for 27 in all. Select and Mask gets Photoshop's full-window workspace, Free Transform moves every selected layer, Save for Web writes WebP, and JPEG XL can be exported. The Flatpak now checks for updates and finds printers, the AppImage runs the bundled CLI, FreeBSD aarch64 builds are back, and Windows releases add debugging-symbol archives. The web build in this release doesn't start; see Web build below. PhotoCraft is still early alpha, so expect rough edges.

The release notes have no scorecard section. In docs/scorecard.md, Select and Mask now describes the full workspace but stays partial, since Refine Hair, Object Aware and Presets are missing. Three new performance scenarios from this release's redraw work are tracked but not run yet; the 3 within budget and 22 over are unchanged. 12 of 182 preferences still do nothing, against 12 of 181 in v0.17.0.

Highlights

• Arabic, the first right-to-left interface language. Arabic (العربية) can be chosen in Preferences, and a system set to Arabic, such as ar-SA or ar-EG, picks it up. Its catalog combines seven community catalogs into one, with one term per concept and specialist terms chosen through a questionnaire with native speakers; it covers every key the project measures, in Modern Standard Arabic with Western digits and Arabic's six plural forms. With Arabic chosen, the window's frame mirrors: the menu bar starts at the right with File, the toolbox docks on the right, the panel dock and its rail on the left, and the title, options and status bars read from the right. Panel interiors, dialogs, menu rows (shortcuts stay on the right), submenus (they still open to the right), document tabs and the canvas aren't mirrored yet (#10006). See /guides/language.
• Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål. Four complete catalogs of 4,552 rows each, combined from seven community catalogs. no and Nynorsk nn locales get Bokmål rather than English, and macOS lists all four. Only the Swedish terms were checked by a native speaker so far (#10021).
• A Select and Mask workspace. Select › Select and Mask… now opens Photoshop's full-window workspace instead of a dialog: an options bar, the tools on the left (Quick Selection, Refine Edge Brush, Brush, Object Selection, Lasso and Polygonal Lasso, Hand, Zoom, with Photoshop's letters), the document in the middle in the chosen view mode, and the Properties panel on the right with View Mode, Edge Detection, Global Refinements and Output Settings. OK applies everything as one history step, Ctrl+Z undoes one edit at a time inside the workspace, and the preview refines on a reduced copy in the background unless High Quality Preview is on. Refine Hair and Object Aware are shown greyed out (#8896). Cutting out a subject step by step: /guides/remove-background.
• Free Transform moves every selected layer. With several layers selected, Ctrl+T / ⌘T draws one box around all of them and transforms them in one undo step; before, only the active layer moved. Type stays editable, layer styles move with the box, and a locked layer refuses the whole transform. Warp is greyed out with several layers, and Distort and Perspective when type is among them (#6590).
• WebP in Save for Web, JPEG XL in Export As. File › Export › Save for Web (Legacy) has WebP, lossy at its Quality (60 by default) or lossless, with transparency and an optional colour profile; the preview shows the real artifacts and file size (#6421). Save As and Export As can write JPEG XL (.jxl), lossless only, 8 or 16 bits, without embedded profile or metadata (#3387).
• Updates and Linux packages. The Flatpak now has network access, so Help › Check for Updates and the check at start work there too; in v0.17.0 they were turned off in the Flatpak (#9982, #10206). Going by the shared updater's code, a .flatpak bundle from the release installed for your own user (flatpak install --user) updates itself by reinstalling the new bundle; a system-wide or repository install only shows the notice. The update prompt shows PhotoCraft's icon and colours instead of a letter in a box (#10243). The Flatpak also lists and prints to CUPS printers, including driverless network ones (#10196), and the AppImage runs its bundled CLI: ./photocraft-0.18.0-linux-x86_64.AppImage --cli --help, or --cli mcp for the MCP server (#3554). See /download/linux.
• Less redrawing, faster selections. A pixel edit now redraws only the tiles that changed: in the project's benchmark, undoing one brush dab on a 15000 × 10000 16-bit layer went from 41.6 ms to 1.1 ms (#9942). Select Subject and Object Selection are about 2.3 times faster on a 24 MP image (#9961), Select › Inverse takes under 1 ms instead of about 90 (#9793), and Smooth and Feather work only around the selection, up to 395 times faster on small ones (#9809).

New tools and features

• Painting: Shift+Alt+right-click with a painting tool opens Photoshop's HUD Color Picker at the pointer; releasing the button keeps the colour, and so does Esc (#6236, #10328). Shift+right-click opens the tool's own blend mode menu, with Edit Brush… on top, for every painting tool (#4985, merged through #10204 and extended in #10328). The Brush and Pencil have Photoshop's Behind mode (#6139), and Alt-click with the Mixer Brush samples a colour as with the Brush (#5082). More on brushes: /guides/brushes.
• Paths and shapes: the Pen, Freeform Pen and Curvature Pen get Photoshop's Path Operations menu: Combine Shapes, Subtract Front Shape, Intersect Shape Areas, Exclude Overlapping Shapes and Merge Shape Components, so a new path can cut a hole in a shape layer (#7648). The path tools edit the saved path selected in the Paths panel (#8986, #3464), and holding Space during a Pen drag moves the anchor (#6139).
• Type: click the font name and type to find a font, with Up, Down and Enter; a font chosen at the caret styles only what you type next (#9461, merged through #10157). Vertical type stacks Latin letters and digits upright, one per em, as Photoshop does, instead of turning the word on its side (#9478). Type on a closed path wraps past the path's starting point (#9523), and type copied to a document of another resolution keeps its size, with the point size adapted (#9594, #10328).
• Layer styles: the Layer Style dialog takes Photoshop's layout: three columns, OK, Cancel, New Style… and Preview on the right, and each slider on one line. It keeps one size on every page and scrolls on short screens (#5010, #4938, #9517). Gradient Overlay takes any number of colour stops (#5270), new effects start from the values saved with Make Default (#9481), and Alt-dragging a Blend If triangle splits it (#3874).
• Filters: Filter Gallery › Cutout traces the image into flat paper shapes, as Photoshop's does, instead of blurring and posterizing it (#7903, #8191, #8192, #8193, #10328). Gaussian Blur radii below 1 now blur by the radius asked for (#8770). See /guides/tools.
• Selections, guides and transforms: the Polygonal Lasso scrolls the canvas when the pointer nears its edge (#2300), a Select Layer Under Cursor command can be given a shortcut (#6139), Alt/⌥ turns a guide while you drag it and dropping a guide on either ruler deletes it (#5650), and Transform remembers its own interpolation without changing the one in Preferences (#8074).
• Interface: File Info's Description, Keywords and Copyright fields take several lines (#6139); the Color panel keeps its options across restarts (#9606); File › Import › Variable Data Sets… opens a file picker (#8901); the Studio Dark theme has square colour chips again (#3520); the Move tool's Align icons and the tab overflow button are larger (#8892, #9004).
• Speed: besides the highlights, the Mixer Brush paints dry strokes up to twice as fast with Sample All Layers (#9924), Camera Raw's Shadows, Highlights, Clarity, Texture and Dehaze stage is about 25% faster with identical output (#9457), and Adaptive Wide Angle answers a slider change about 5 to 18 times faster on its preview (#9921). Reduce Noise, median and entropy stacking, round brush tips, retouch strokes, Curves drawing, Color Range and marquee Add and Subtract got faster too (#9639, #9628, #9622, #9847, #9532, #9826, #9814, #9813).

File formats

• PSD: layer effects that Photoshop 2026 writes with a layer's own blend key, such as Linear Dodge, no longer fall back to Normal (#8685). A style-only type edit, such as a new font or size, now reaches Photoshop, which reads type style from the document's Txt2 block (#8888), and that block is dropped once no type layers are left (#9596). Layer-effect contours are written with at most 16 points, so Photoshop no longer drops the whole style of a layer using Cone, Ring or another long built-in contour (#9590). A Displace smart filter that names its map file without embedding it opens (#9472).
• Colour: Embed Color Profile writes sRGB into JPEGs and other exports of a new, untagged document, which used to go out with no profile (#9342, #9339). Flatten Image and merges keep the inks of a CMYK document with an embedded profile (#4035), and Color Lookup reads the Mesh header of .3dl files (#9418).
• Large images: PNG export of documents over 256 MiB of pixels is encoded in bands, so very large banners export without doubling memory, and files that compress past 2 GiB no longer fail (#8472). Image › Mode › Bitmap converts huge images in bands instead of crashing (#8488).
• Patterns: Define Pattern takes up to 8000 px per edge instead of 4000 (#8902), patterns shown below 100% no longer shimmer into moiré (#8903), and imported patterns are kept across restarts (#5176).
• More: File › Export › Layers to Files can trim transparent margins (#3519); Video Frames to Layers takes every page of a multi-page TIFF (#6387); older Sony ARW files use the white balance and black level the camera stored (#3142); Affinity files open about a fifth faster (#9416).

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

Languages

The official builds include 27 interface languages, up from 22. All five new catalogs cover every key cargo xtask i18n-coverage measures, and they were reviewed for consistency rather than by native speakers, apart from the Arabic and Swedish questionnaires; corrections are welcome upstream. Their 14 community authors are credited as co-authors and in ATTRIBUTION.md (#10006, #10021).

• Arabic on the desktop is drawn with the Arabic font the release builds bundle. Arabic and Hebrew layer names, and the title bar, read in the right word order again. Files opened at launch now report in the interface language, in every language (#10006).
• Spanish gets 548 rows that still showed in English (#4023). Hindi stays partly translated.

Setting the language: /guides/language.

Automation (CLI & MCP)

• edit.transform moves every selected layer when no layer is given, as Free Transform does; it also takes "layers": [id, …]. Pass layer to move one (#6590).
• The CLI ships inside more packages. The AppImage runs it with --cli, or through a symlink named photocraft-cli (#3554); PhotoCraft.app on macOS carries photocraft-cli, and droplets find it there (#4742).
• photocraft-cli run and batch skip Deselect when nothing is selected, as action playback does, instead of failing (#8807). An unknown command id gets up to three suggestions, such as "did you mean edit.undo" (#3748). engine.execute can't change a document behind an open dialog (#4993), and --control on a busy port exits at once with code 2 (#6492).
• New parameters: "format": "webp" and lossless for file.export.saveForWebLegacy (#6421), trim for file.export.layersToFiles (#3519), colour stops for Gradient Overlay (#5270), toOrientation for view.moveGuide (#5650) and a ui object that drives the Select and Mask workspace (#8896). The perf output lists slow frames, those over 50 ms, with the time each stage took (#9943).
• Actions: an Arrange step that can't move the layer, such as Bring to Front on the top layer, plays on as in Photoshop; it stopped 86 of 295 actions in the reporter's collection (#8457). The COPYCAT, AJ_Actions2023 and LineAndColorTutorial sets play (#5176), and a recorded eye click replays on the layer with the same name in another document (#3461). More on actions: /guides/actions.

Setup and examples: /guides/mcp-cli.

Web build

The v0.18.0 web build doesn't start. app/photocraft-web.js loads a small script from app/snippets/…, but the zip has the snippets/ folder only at its top level, so the browser gets a 404 and the page stays at "Loading PhotoCraft…". v0.17.0 has the same fault. It is reported in #10092, #10487, #10491 and #10590, all still open, and the fix, #10248, isn't merged yet. The issue authors report that copying snippets/ into app/ makes it start.

The online editor on this site therefore stays on the v0.16.0 web build until a fixed build is released.

For reference, the v0.18.0 zip is 13,331,007 bytes (12.7 MiB), up from v0.17.0's 12,955,028. The app is one gzipped part, app/photocraft-web-*.part-aa, of 13,226,931 bytes (12.6 MiB); unpacked, it is 29,647,620 bytes (28.3 MiB), up from 28,982,124. As in v0.17.0, the zip also holds NOTICE, ATTRIBUTION.md with the credits for bundled assets and translations, and the snippets/ folder. Self-hosting notes are on /download/web.

Fixes and stability

• Painting: Brush strokes in an Indexed Color document stay within its colour table (#8823). The Clone Source overlay shows for the Healing Brush too, soft as the brush (#8912); the brush resize preview shows the soft falloff the brush really paints (#8935); the options bar's brush chip draws the brush's own tip (#8963). A 1 px Pencil line stays connected at turns (#9623), and the History Brush keeps its source after Clear History (#8715).
• Layers and blending: a new fill or adjustment layer made from a selection drops that selection, as in Photoshop (#8811); Align measures shape layers partly off the canvas correctly (#8779); Blend If, Fill in the special blend modes, Pass Through groups, feathered masks at the canvas edge and edits over huge 32-bit values match Photoshop more closely (#9584, #9589, #9595, #9512, #9493, #9509).
• Keyboard shortcuts: a set named with / or = keeps its full name, a bare + key survives saving (#8548, #8640), and ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z can be recorded as a shortcut (#9504). See /guides/shortcuts.
• Export As: a remembered pixel size keeps the proportions of the image being exported, so portraits are no longer squashed (#8791).
• Starting and quitting: a launch that fails, for example with no usable GPU, says why in a dialog with the log file's path instead of closing silently (#9436). Full Screen Mode needs an open document (#9354).
• Platforms: on macOS, saving over a file keeps its creation date (#9401). A document dragged into its own window stays there (#5744). On Wayland, extra windows carry PhotoCraft's app id, and Pick Screen Color works when the window runs through Xwayland (#9894, #9893).
• Memory and safety: re-rendering a smart object needs about a quarter of the memory it did, Edit › Purge › All clears the cache of decoded smart object sources, and the web build caps its memory use at 1536 MB (#10080). Plug-in filters are held to 2 GiB per run across all threads (#8905); Trim and Duplicate refuse documents too large to render instead of crashing (#7255); a linked smart object that points at something other than a regular file no longer hangs a PSD save (#8897).

More known problems and fixes: /guides/troubleshooting.

Breaking changes or things to know

• Not everything listed on GitHub is in the release. 22 listed pull requests were reverted before the tag, among them Filter › Other › Frequency Separation, the Crop tool's right-click menu, rotating the view with Shift and the middle button, Actions JSON import and export, Roman Hanging Punctuation, Preset menus for Levels and three other adjustments, and starter action presets (#10204, #10328).
• Free Transform and edit.transform take every selected layer. Scripts and MCP agents that call edit.transform without layer while several layers are selected now move all of them (#6590).
• The Windows portable zip has no inner folder. photocraft.exe, photocraft-cli.exe and portable.txt sit at the top of the zip, so unpack it into a folder of its own (#7743).
• The Flatpak has network access. It now checks GitHub for releases, like the other desktop builds; turn that off in Preferences › General › Automatically Check for Updates. With network shared, a --control server on 127.0.0.1 is also reachable from the host (#9982, #10206).
• Update and Restart on Windows MSI installs. The report that it restarts PhotoCraft without installing anything is still open (#10477). That is v0.17.0's update library, which looked for an MSI copy only in a folder the installer doesn't use. If it happens, download the v0.18.0 MSI from /download/windows and run it once. The update library in v0.18.0 finds an MSI install through its App Paths registration wherever it is installed, so later updates should install in place; no user has confirmed that yet. The DMG, the Windows portable zip, the AppImage, the .deb and .rpm packages and the Linux .tar.gz update themselves, as since v0.17.0.
• Liquify has no Twirl Counterclockwise tool. As in Photoshop, hold Alt/⌥ with Twirl Clockwise (#10328).
• Select and Mask's Shift Edge works differently. It now moves soft edges and leaves a hard selection where it is, so recorded actions that use it can give different masks (#5176, #10328).
• The web build doesn't start, and this site's online editor stays on v0.16.0 for now; see Web build above.
• Windows 7 and 8: PhotoCraft still needs Windows 10 or later, and the v0.18.0 MSI still has no installer check for older versions.

How to update

Download the v0.18.0 build for your system from /download: Windows, macOS, Linux or the web build, which doesn't start for now. The release has 32 files, four more than v0.17.0, with SHA256SUMS.txt to check them against:

• FreeBSD aarch64 is back, 117,372,774 bytes, now that the packaging script names and finds a cross-compiled build (#9989). The CI time limit in craft-common-actions#39 is still open.
• windows-x64-symbols.zip, windows-x86-symbols.zip and windows-arm64-symbols.zip, about 6 MB each, hold the debugging symbols (.pdb files) of that release's photocraft.exe and photocraft-cli.exe. They let a profiler, or someone analysing a crash, see PhotoCraft's function names instead of bare addresses. PhotoCraft doesn't need them to run, so skip them unless a developer asks for them (#6383).
• The macOS DMG grew from 136,121,117 to 244,539,770 bytes, mostly because PhotoCraft.app now carries photocraft-cli (#4742). The separate CLI zip is still there.

Builds come only from the official GitHub release; avoid third-party mirrors. If you are coming from v0.16.0 or earlier, also read the v0.17.0 notes. If you already run v0.17.0, its update prompt can install v0.18.0 for you; for MSI installs, see above, and a v0.17.0 Flatpak doesn't check, so install the v0.18.0 bundle by hand.

Full release notes, with every merged pull request: PhotoCraft v0.18.0 on GitHub.