PhotoCraft v0.5.0: Remove Background, HEIC and six new languages

PhotoCraft v0.5.0 is the release after v0.3.0 (there is no v0.4.0 release). It adds one-step Remove Background and Relight, opens HEIC photos, brings several more Photoshop-style tools, and gives machines with unreliable GPUs a CPU rendering mode. PhotoCraft is still early alpha, so expect rough edges.

Highlights

• Layer › Remove Background. Cuts out the subject of a pixel layer in one undoable step. By default it adds a layer mask, so the original pixels stay intact (#734).
• Filter › Render › Relight. Moves the light source in an existing photo, with a live-preview dialog for angle, elevation, intensity, ambient, warmth and softness. It records as a smart filter (#735).
• HEIC/HEIF photos open (#372), and WebP export gains a lossy encoder with quality and lossless controls (#880).
• New tools: Magnetic Lasso, Patch, Content-Aware Move, Direct Selection (reshape paths after drawing them), and the Mixer Brush is now available as a tool in the UI.
• Rendering modes and CPU fallback. Preferences › Performance now offers Automatic, GPU and CPU / Compatibility. If the GPU canvas fails, PhotoCraft switches to CPU compositing and shows one warning with Keep Using CPU and Retry GPU; your documents are left unchanged, and Retry GPU takes effect after a restart (#434).
• Six new interface languages (French, Indonesian, Korean, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian), live language switching without a restart, and a completed Simplified Chinese catalog.
• macOS uses the native menu bar at the top of the screen instead of in-window menus (#894).
• Help › Search finds any menu command by name (#815).

New tools and features

• Selection: the Magnetic Lasso tool (#864); Polygonal Lasso closes on double-click; Alt held in the freehand Lasso draws straight segments; drag a selection to move its outline; selection tools get the full right-click menu.
• Retouching: the Patch tool with live preview (#381) and the Content-Aware Move tool (#814). Spot Healing with Sample All Layers can heal onto an empty layer.
• Transform: Skew, Distort and Perspective are real modes; Undo steps through a transform in progress; picking another tool applies the transform; drag-and-drop places a file onto the canvas in Free Transform.
• Layers: Alt-click a layer's eye to show only that layer, drag down the eye column to show or hide several layers, drag layers onto another document's tab to copy them, Layer › Smart Objects › Convert to Layers, Edit Contents in the smart object context menu, and locking a group locks its layers.
• Type: the Color panel, Swatches and Color Picker recolour selected text; double-click a type layer's thumbnail to edit it; vertical type from the Type tool flyout.
• Camera Raw: interactive histogram, clipping warnings and scopes, a reworked preview, and settings that read and write as a live PSD smart filter.
• Interface: fixed UI scale steps from 75% to 300% in Preferences › Interface (#611); window and panel sizes are remembered across restarts; the active ICC profile shows in the status bar; the monitor profile follows the display each window is on; numeric fields evaluate typed arithmetic.
• Speed: large-radius Gaussian Blur is fast, live preview included; Box Blur is up to 26x faster at large radii; Surface Blur is 13x to 40x+ faster on 8-bit layers; Layer via Copy, Copy and Cut are 33x faster on a 24 MP image, per the PR titles.

File formats

• HEIC/HEIF import.
• Lossy WebP export (pure-Rust encoder) with quality and lossless controls.
• Layered TIFF: open and save Photoshop layer data in TIFF files, plus BigTIFF and every IFD/SubIFD.
• Deep OpenEXR (deep scanline and deep tile) decodes.
• .psdt templates open as new untitled documents.
• Large PSB files over 2 GiB open with their pixels.
• Export As gains a Metadata choice (see below).

Languages

New interface languages: French, Indonesian, Korean, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Italian. The Simplified Chinese catalog was completed, including brush sections. Changing the language in Preferences now applies immediately and keeps the open document and its undo history (#582), and on first launch PhotoCraft follows the operating system's language (#661). See /guides/language.

Automation (CLI & MCP)

• actions.record, actions.stop, actions.play and actions.list let agents and the CLI record and replay actions (#622).
• Type hitTest, caret and navigate commands let agents edit text by position (#623).
• layer.removeBackground and filter.render.relight also work headless.
• Security fixes: ambient file-system authorization gaps were closed (#763), and an allowed command can no longer run a denied one on its behalf (#861).

Fixes and stability

• Wayland: text fields no longer reset the input method every frame, which caused endless key repeats (#723).
• Windows DX12 never loads a foreign dxcompiler.dll from PATH (#817).
• Export As no longer saves WebP files as *.webp.psd; JPEG export no longer fails when XMP is over 64 KB; large PNG exports no longer lose bytes.
• The multi-file open dialog works; Apply Image onto a transparent layer no longer turns it black.
• The Linux AppImage registers its desktop entry and icon on launch.
• Many hardening fixes for hostile or corrupt files and out-of-range parameters (overflows in geometry, text, slices and PSD patterns).

Breaking changes or things to know

• Exported PNG, JPEG and WebP files no longer embed the document's XMP by default. XMP can contain the text of every type layer. Export As has a Metadata choice (None / All) if you need it (#733).
• Scripted TIFF saves are flat by default. CLI, batch and MCP saves write a flat TIFF unless you ask for layers (--tiff-layers, or "tiffLayers": true). Save As in the app still keeps TIFF layers (#825).
• Dialog buttons follow the platform order. On Windows and Linux, OK comes first and the unsaved-changes prompt asks Yes / No / Cancel; macOS keeps Don't Save / Cancel / Save (#826).
• macOS menus moved to the system menu bar. Preferences is now Settings in the PhotoCraft app menu. To get the in-window menus back, launch with --in-window-menus or set PHOTOCRAFT_IN_WINDOW_MENUS=1 (#894).
• photocraft --control now rejects a port it cannot parse instead of ignoring it (#777).

How to update

Download the v0.5.0 build for your system from /download: Windows, macOS, Linux or the web build. Builds come only from the official GitHub release; avoid third-party mirrors.

Full release notes, with every merged pull request: PhotoCraft v0.5.0 on GitHub.