PhotoCraft v0.7.0: Remove tool, OpenRaster and a new Crop tool

PhotoCraft v0.7.0 came out on 11 October 2026, one day after v0.6.0. Its release notes list 244 merged pull requests from 71 contributors, 34 of them first-time contributors. The README now counts 55 tools, up from 52 in v0.6.0: the new Remove tool and the Single Row and Single Column Marquee. Much of the rest makes existing commands behave the way Photoshop does, often checked against Photoshop by script. PhotoCraft is still early alpha, so expect rough edges.

Highlights

• The Remove tool. It sits first in the healing (J) group. Paint over an object, or draw a loop around it, and PhotoCraft fills the area from its surroundings. It runs as a background job with one undo step, respects the selection and offers Sample All Layers. There is no generative mode (#2193).
• Single Row and Single Column Marquee. A click selects a one-pixel row or column across the whole canvas. Both are in the Marquee flyout (#2848).
• OpenRaster (.ora) opens and saves, with layers, groups and blend modes at 8 and 16 bits, for exchanging files with Krita, MyPaint and GIMP (#2257). Adobe's lossy DNG files open too (#2021).
• Layered edits of flat images save as PSD. Open a JPEG, add a layer and press Save, and PhotoCraft now suggests a PSD instead of flattening over the JPEG (#2234). Save As to JPEG or PNG writes a copy, and the layered original stays the document's file (#2611).
• The Crop tool works like Photoshop's. By default the crop box stays upright and the image turns behind it. Use Classic Mode (P) brings back the old behaviour, and Auto Center Preview keeps the box centred (#2545). A new W x H x Resolution mode crops to an exact size and resolution, with Photoshop's size presets and Front Image (#2483).
• Image warp can be grabbed anywhere on the grid, Ctrl-click cuts the grid at the pointer, and Warp is in the Free Transform right-click menu (#2621).
• Better brushes. Soft brushes now paint soft strokes and thin lines stay even (#2167). A Pressure curve in Preferences › Tools shapes how pen pressure reaches every brush (#2195).
• A build for RISC-V Linux: a new linux-riscv64 tarball (#2965).

New tools and features

• Selection: Select › Modify › Feather, Smooth and Border now give Photoshop's results. Before, Feather came out half as wide, Smooth left a soft fringe on every edge, and Border made a thin hard ring instead of a soft band (#2529, #2557, #2564). Select and Mask refines about 4x faster on the CPU (#2154) and Quick Selection strokes are about 3.5x faster (#2436). Shift constrains Polygonal Lasso segments, and Esc deselects when nothing else needs the key (#2765).
• Retouching: Content-Aware Fill, Spot Healing and Content-Aware Move were reworked to copy texture the way Photoshop does instead of smearing it, and the Patch tool gains a Content-Aware mode (#2202). Clone Stamp gets Opacity and Flow (#2256), and Spot Healing's Create Texture keeps film grain.
• Painting: the Eraser gains Pencil and Block modes (#2694, #2778); Wet Edges acts on the whole stroke rather than each dab (#2721); a quick pen tap paints at its own pressure instead of full or zero (#2757); 1 px Pencil lines step pixel by pixel.
• Layers and masks: Layer › New › Background from Layer, and the Background now stays at the bottom of the stack (#2663); Layer › Rasterize › Layer Style bakes effects into pixels (#2669); Properties shows Density and Feather for pixel masks (#2240) and Photoshop's Refine row (Select and Mask, Color Range, Invert) (#2639); masks and pixels keep separate foreground/background colour pairs (#2200); Layer via Copy duplicates every selected layer; Shift-click on New Group groups the selected layers.
• Adjustments and blending: legacy Brightness/Contrast matches Photoshop when both sliders move (#2615). Fill below 100% now works inside the blend for Photoshop's "special eight" modes (Color Burn, Linear Burn, Color Dodge, Linear Dodge, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Hard Mix, Difference) (#2552). Hue/Saturation Colorize at 0% saturation gives grey.
• Filters: previews show ripples, dots, cells and other features at the size OK applies them, for most filters and the Filter Gallery (#2207, #2494). Smart filter edits re-render from cached stages in a background job, so hiding a filter no longer freezes the window (#2739).
• Type: hovering a font in the picker previews it on the canvas (#2431); tabs advance to tab stops and the Tab key types a tab (#2733); Warp Text opens with the layer's warp and previews it live.
• Interface: a search field in Preferences (#2679); UI scale steps of 80, 85, 90 and 95% (#2678); Breeze Light and Breeze Dark themes (#2335); dock tabs can be dragged to reorder (#2774); double-click a New Document preset to create it; size readouts follow the ruler unit (cm, mm, in). Numeric fields now accept parentheses, powers and pi, and more fields accept arithmetic (#2252).
• Keyboard and mouse: Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab switch documents (#2353); a middle click closes a document tab (#2637); holding Alt+Space zooms out (#2877); a tool key brings back the last tool you used in its group (#2625). See /guides/shortcuts.
• Speed: merging layers that cover a small part of a large canvas is much faster, 2.6 s down to 27 ms in the PR's benchmark (#2664); menus stay responsive on documents with thousands of layers (#2454); Iris Blur, Pixelate's Facet and Color Halftone, and bevel size changes are faster.

File formats

• OpenRaster (.ora) open and save, also from the CLI, MCP and the web build. Saving bakes masks and other layer kinds into pixels and warns about anything ORA can't hold (#2257).
• Lossy DNG (compression 34892, baseline JPEG tiles) decodes (#2021).
• OpenEXR: parts, channel groups and an AOV precomp import as layers (#2338), and Cryptomatte layers are read (#2180).
• TGA saves the document's alpha as 32-bit alpha (#2157), and a 32-bit Targa opens with its alpha as "Alpha 1" (#2482).
• Exports no longer carry the source photo's EXIF thumbnail, which made edited photos show the original in Finder and upload pickers (#2450).
• PSD: CMYK solid and gradient fills survive round trips (#2628), and unedited text is written back unchanged (#2427).
• Current Affinity .af files open with their artboards (#2355). Affinity and Paint.NET PDN reading arrived in v0.6.0.
• Save and export dialogs remember where each document was last saved during the session (#2421).

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

Languages

There are no new interface languages; the official builds still include 17. Russian gains the Layer Style effects (#2210) and Spanish the Add Noise and Reduce Noise dialogs (#2470), and a few remaining hard-coded strings can now be translated (#2467). Thai file names in Recent no longer show as boxes (#2280), font menus show an Arabic sample for fonts that cover Arabic, and Filter › Plug-ins keeps its entries in every language. See /guides/language.

Automation (CLI & MCP)

• The MCP docs now show how to register the server from an installed release (MSI, deb/rpm, macOS CLI zip), not only from a source build (#2185).
• Automation file paths can be absolute as long as they lie beneath the granted read or write root, for example C:/Users/me/a.png with --automation-read-root C:/ (#2216).
• Actions record File › Save and Save As (#2746), and double-clicking an action's name renames it; agents can use actions.rename (#2769).
• Batch: a failed step inside a called action now fails the file and the script (#2783), and recorded zoom and view steps are skipped in batches and droplets (#2761).
• edit.keyboardShortcuts {"importKys": ...} imports a Photoshop shortcut set, and on first launch the app asks before importing one it finds (#2251).

Setup and examples: /guides/mcp-cli.

Web build

The online editor on this site runs the v0.7.0 web build. The release zip is 10.5 MiB.

• To stay under the size limit, the wasm leaves out the JPEG XL decoder for DNG files. DNGs compressed with JPEG XL (DNG 1.7, for example Samsung Expert RAW) open only in the desktop app; every other DNG and raw format still opens in the browser (#2233).
• File › Open opens every file you select, not only the first (#2807).
• Ctrl/Cmd+V no longer pastes twice (#2643).

Self-hosting notes are on /download/web.

Fixes and stability

• Linux: CPU rendering mode no longer leaves the app unable to start on NVIDIA. When no GL adapter can show the window, it uses Vulkan for that, while drawing stays on the CPU (#2206, issue #1337).
• Window edges on Windows and Linux are easier to grab, use cursors every theme has, and keep working after a resize on KDE Wayland (#2205).
• Windows: on some systems the custom title bar left black bars and offset the pointer; fixed (#2401).
• Linux: no false "missing library" warning when the linker cache can't be read (#2503), and a light/dark change during start-up is no longer lost.
• Quitting or Close All with several unsaved documents: answering No now closes that document right away (#2610).
• Large copy, paste, fill and transform operations that run out of memory fail with an error and leave the document and history unchanged (#2530).
• Pressing Delete with a layer mask selected no longer deletes the image, Free Transform keeps the layer's place in the stack, and UI scale no longer magnifies the image itself.

More known problems and fixes: /guides/troubleshooting.

Breaking changes or things to know

• Save suggests PSD for layered edits of flat files, and Save As to a flat format is a copy when the document has layers or lives in a layered file. Ctrl+S keeps writing the layered original (#2234, #2611).
• Some results change on purpose. Feather, Smooth, Border, legacy Brightness/Contrast and Fill in the special eight blend modes now match Photoshop, so they differ from earlier PhotoCraft versions. Replaying an older action can give a different image.
• The Crop tool's default mode changed. Turn on Use Classic Mode, or press P with the Crop tool, for the old behaviour (#2545).
• New default keys: Alt+Space (hold) zooms out; saved Keyboard Shortcuts overrides are kept (#2877). In the Type tool, Tab types a tab (#2733). Esc deselects (#2765).
• The Layers panel's trash button asks before deleting layers, with Don't show again. The Delete key, menus and automation don't ask (#2197).
• The Background layer stays at the bottom. Arrange commands and drags that would move it or put a layer under it are refused (#2663).
• Scripts: extended filters and the Filter Gallery reject unknown option values with a bad-params error instead of silently using the default (#2548, #2599).
• The RISC-V build is a tarball only and needs glibc 2.39 or newer (built on Ubuntu 24.04). Before release only the CLI's --version is tested under emulation, so it is the least-tested build.

How to update

Download the v0.7.0 build for your system from /download: Windows, macOS, Linux or the web build. The release has 24 files, including the new photocraft-0.7.0-linux-riscv64.tar.gz and SHA256SUMS.txt. Builds come only from the official GitHub release; avoid third-party mirrors. If you are coming from v0.5.0, also read the v0.6.0 notes.

Full release notes, with every merged pull request: PhotoCraft v0.7.0 on GitHub.