PhotoCraft v0.8.2: twelve new tools, History snapshots and new docking

PhotoCraft v0.8.2 came out on 12 October 2026, one day after v0.7.0. It is the release after v0.7.0: there is no v0.8.0 or v0.8.1 release, and the version went straight from 0.7.0 to 0.8.2. Its release notes list 414 merged pull requests from 103 contributors, 53 of them first-time contributors. The README now counts 67 tools, up from 55 in v0.7.0. Many other changes add Photoshop's dialogs where PhotoCraft ran a command straight away, or make results match Photoshop's, often measured against Photoshop by script. PhotoCraft is still early alpha, so expect rough edges.

Highlights

• Twelve new tools: Artboard (#2862), Perspective Crop (#2864), Frame (#2915), Color Sampler (#2753), Color Replacement (#2719), Freeform Pen and Curvature Pen (#2856), Add and Delete Anchor Point (#2756), Convert Point (#3211), and Horizontal and Vertical Type Mask (#2861). The full list is on /guides/tools.
• Shift switches tools, as in Photoshop. Pressing a tool's key again now keeps the current tool; Shift plus the key cycles through its group. Preferences › Tools › Use Shift Key for Tool Switch is now on by default (#3528).
• New panel docking. The dock was rebuilt on the shared craft-ui docking code. Dragging a panel sideways out of the dock detaches it, custom layouts are saved with workspaces, and panel menus and workspace commands keep working (#3097). A single tab can move to another group (#3239), and dragging a document tab off the tab strip floats it in its own window (#3785).
• History snapshots. The camera button in the History panel takes a named snapshot, and clicking it brings the document back to that state as one undoable step. Snapshots last for the session and aren't saved with the file, as in Photoshop. In the Studio themes the camera button isn't shown yet (#3545).
• Type controls: the Character panel gains Photoshop's row of eight OpenType buttons, from Standard Ligatures to Fractions (#3757), and variable fonts get one slider per axis, with optical size following the type size (#2996).
• Select and Mask previews live in Photoshop's view modes (Onion Skin, Overlay, On Black and so on) (#2970), gains the Refine Edge Brush (#2989), and can output to a new document, with or without a layer mask (#3007).
• Three new interface languages: Vietnamese (#2636), Turkish (#3809) and Hungarian (#3831), for 20 in all.
• More files open: FITS astronomy images open and save (#2956), every frame of an animated GIF can load into a video layer (#2999), and monochrome DNGs open (#3503).

New tools and features

• The new tools: the Artboard tool sits in the Move group (V) and draws, moves and resizes artboards. Perspective Crop (in the Crop group) straightens a skewed quad into a rectangle. The Frame tool (K) draws rectangular or elliptical frames, taking in the selected layer's pixels. Color Sampler (in the Eyedropper group) pins up to 10 sample points whose values show in the Info panel; they aren't saved with the file. Color Replacement is in the Brush group. The Pen group now holds Pen, Freeform Pen, Curvature Pen, Add Anchor Point, Delete Anchor Point and Convert Point. Horizontal and Vertical Type Mask (in the Type group) turn typed text into a selection.
• Dialogs instead of instant commands: Layer › New › Layer… (Shift+Ctrl/⌘+N) opens Photoshop's New Layer dialog with name, clipping, colour, mode, opacity and neutral fill (#3104). Layer › Duplicate Layer… asks for the copy's name and the document to put it in (#3440). View › New Guide Layout… has Photoshop's columns, rows and margins with a live preview (#2930), and New Guide… takes any unit and a colour (#3553). Select › Save Selection… and Load Selection… open their dialogs (#3738). Layer › New Fill Layer › Pattern… gets the Pattern Fill dialog (#2979), and Layer Style gets contour pickers and a Contour Editor (#2949).
• Adjustments: Levels gains black, gray and white point eyedroppers (#3128), and Curves gains a pencil mode and Smooth (#3108) and its eyedroppers in the Properties panel (#3115). Hue/Saturation (#3781), Black & White tint (#3780), Shadows/Highlights (#3765), Color Balance (#3443), Selective Color in Absolute mode (#3793) and Image Size resampling (#2451) were measured against Photoshop and now give its results.
• Paths and painting: Stroke Path works with every brush-based tool, not only the Brush, Pencil and Eraser, and has Simulate Pressure (#3039). Holding ~ with the Brush or Pencil erases with that tool's own brush (#3465); [ can now shrink the brush to 1 px (#3332); soft, low-flow strokes in 8-bit documents are dithered instead of banded (#3237). The brush outline and crosshair are now system cursors on macOS, X11 and Wayland, as they already were on Windows, so they no longer trail the pointer (#3243).
• Layers and smart objects: in the desktop app, linked smart objects update by themselves when their file changes while the document is open, each update one undo step (#2510). Edit › Copy with several layers selected copies them all and Paste recreates them (#3394); a targeted layer mask can be copied too (#3267). Also new: Merge Group (#3888), Combine Shapes (#2906), and a Move tool drag from an empty spot that selects the layers it touches (#2852).
• Transform and filters: Vanishing Point has an on-canvas plane editor instead of a form (#3133); Content-Aware Scale uses a transform box with live preview (#3103); Puppet Warp's mesh follows the object's outline (#3117); the generic filter dialogs show a preview window inside the dialog (#3877).
• Type: triple-click selects a line, four clicks a paragraph and five all the text (#3496), and Khmer, Lao and Burmese text falls back to installed fonts (#3259).
• Interface: tool options are remembered between launches (#2822), with Reset Tool and Reset All Tools on a right-click of the options bar's tool icon (#2830); View › Extras, Show and Snap To are remembered too (#3787). New are Photoshop's two light brightness levels, Pro (Light Gray) and Pro (Light) (#2892), favourite themes on a right-click of the appearance button (#2445), a switch for the Studio theme's canvas dots (#2317) and an Enable animations preference (#3276). Numeric fields accept units such as 2.5 cm or 50% and have scrubby labels (#3100); the Window menu lists open documents (#3147); saves show "Saving NN%" (#3485).
• Keyboard: more of Photoshop's keys, such as Ctrl/⌘+, to hide and show layers, / to lock transparent pixels, Ctrl/⌘+Alt+2 to load luminosity, Tab to rename the next layer (#3710), and the arrow keys to turn the brush tip (#3725). Brush size and hardness keys work on layouts where [ and ] need AltGr, such as German (#3112). See /guides/shortcuts.
• Speed: releasing a long brush stroke no longer freezes the window; in the PR's benchmark the commit went from 136 ms to 0.8 ms (#2131). Extrude went from 160 s to 0.39 s on a 24 MP image, and Wind is about 9x faster (#2685). Content-Aware Fill and Spot Healing got back the speed they lost in v0.7.0, and a cancelled fill stops almost at once (#3395). Duplicating, pasting or deleting a layer, and undoing those steps, now recomposite only where the layer draws (#2884, #2917, #3847).

File formats

• FITS (.fits, .fit, .fts) opens and saves at 8, 16 and 32 bits, gray or RGB, for stacks from Siril, PixInsight or DeepSkyStacker (#2956).
• Animated GIFs: New Video Layer from File, Replace Footage and Video Frames to Layers take every frame. File › Open still opens the first frame only, and a saved .pcraft keeps only the current frame (#2999).
• Monochrome DNGs, such as VueScan film scans and Leica Monochrom raws, open as gray images (#3503).
• Krita .kra files open as a single flat image, the composite Krita stores in the file; layers and masks are not imported, and Save won't overwrite the .kra (#3700). Legacy PCX images open, read only (#3701). TIFFs with JPEG or CCITT fax compression decode (#3727).
• File › Save keeps a JPEG's quality and a WebP's lossy or lossless encoding. Before, every JPEG was saved at quality 90 and every WebP lossless (#4032).
• Layer › Export As and Quick Export as PNG write one file per selected layer or artboard (#3909, #3462).
• Colour: camera files tagged sRGB only in EXIF open as sRGB instead of taking the working space (#3026), and pasting into iPhone photos with Apple's Wide Color Sharing profile no longer fails (#3900).
• PSD: Displace smart filters import with their map (#3680), PSB-derived files open in Photoshop after a save (#3743), and many fixes to gradients, type layers and CMYK and Lab documents.

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

Languages

The official builds now include 20 interface languages: Vietnamese (#2636), Turkish (#3809) and Hungarian (#3831) are new. Brazilian Portuguese is complete (#3254), the Spanish catalog was reviewed (#3154), and Japanese, Czech and Italian were updated. The window can now mirror for right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew (#3114), but no right-to-left language ships yet. The Layers panel finds a font for layer names in Thai, Arabic, Devanagari and other scripts (#2758). See /guides/language.

Automation (CLI & MCP)

• CLI batch skips recorded zoom, view and save steps instead of failing on them (#3143).
• photocraft-cli run now stops and fails when a recorded action fails. Before, it carried on, exported --out and exited 0 (#3861).
• The MCP bridge reconnects before an idle connection is closed, retries reads, and gives clearer timeout errors (#2507). The command_batch description now says it is not atomic: steps that succeeded stay applied (#3338).
• New commands: doc.place places a file from the read root (#3215), Export Layers to Files and data sets work through the granted roots (#3230), history.newSnapshot and related commands (#3545), and history.undo / history.redo aliases (#3786).
• engine.commands says why a command is disabled (#3740), commands that name a layer check that layer rather than the active one (#3466), and opening, saving or editing text warns when a font is missing (#3630).

Setup and examples: /guides/mcp-cli.

Web build

The online editor on this site runs the v0.8.2 web build. The release zip is 10.6 MiB, and the wasm file inside is 24,164,396 bytes (23.0 MiB), smaller than v0.7.0's 24,996,331 bytes. egui's built-in fonts are now stored compressed and the translation catalogs store their English keys once, which brought the wasm back under the project's 24 MiB limit (#4253).

• Chinese, Japanese and Korean text still shows as empty boxes in the web build, in type layers and in the interface. The web build has no CJK font yet (#1615, still open). Use the desktop app for CJK text.
• Saving presets no longer moves the canvas down while the browser stores them (#3805).

Self-hosting notes are on /download/web.

Fixes and stability

• macOS: PhotoCraft no longer crashes at start on Monterey with Intel Iris Pro graphics (#3171).
• Linux: fonts are found through Fontconfig, including CJK faces chosen for your locale (#2961); on X11 each monitor's ICC profile is used automatically (#2963) and by the screen colour picker (#2962); the startup library check reads ldconfig on non-English systems, and when no file dialog can open, the status bar says what to install (#3397).
• Linux: long menus on Wayland no longer run under the taskbar (#3739), the AppImage no longer adds a second launcher next to AppImageLauncher or Gear Lever (#3641), and docks and taskbars can now match the window to its launcher (#3481).
• Windows: the GPU memory budget follows the installed RAM instead of assuming 16 GB (#3189).
• Autosave no longer reports a failure for a save that worked, and leftover recovery files are cleaned up (#3502).
• Security: exports such as Save for Web stay inside the folder you chose, slice HTML is escaped by default, and automation files and MCP messages get stricter size checks (#2269). The AppImage build verifies the tools it downloads (#2270). More PSD, PNG, WebP and TIFF parsing checks reject damaged or hostile files before allocating memory.

More known problems and fixes: /guides/troubleshooting.

Breaking changes or things to know

• Pressing a tool key twice no longer cycles the group. Use Shift plus the key, or turn off Preferences › Tools › Use Shift Key for Tool Switch for the old behaviour. A settings file that already stores this preference keeps its value (#3528).
• Layer › New › Layer… and Layer › Duplicate Layer… open dialogs. Ctrl/⌘+J, the Layers panel's + button and automation still act at once (#3104, #3440).
• Some results change on purpose. Hue/Saturation, Black & White tint, Shadows/Highlights, Color Balance, Selective Color (Absolute) and Image Size resampling now match Photoshop, and Image › Mode › 32 Bits/Channel converts to linear light (#3792). Replaying an older action can give a different image.
• UI scale Auto no longer doubles the interface on 4K screens set to 100% in the system. Pick 200% in Preferences › Interface if you want it larger (#3165).
• File › Save keeps the original JPEG quality and WebP encoding instead of quality 90 and lossless (#4032).
• Windows 7 and 8: PhotoCraft needs Windows 10 or later and fails to start on 7 and 8 (#2310). The release body lists an installer check for this (#3261), but it was removed again before the build, so the v0.8.2 MSI still installs on Windows 7 and 8 without a warning.
• RISC-V: the release now has linux-riscv64 .deb and .rpm packages besides the tarball. The v0.8.2 README still describes only the tarball, built on Ubuntu 24.04 (glibc 2.39 or newer).

How to update

Download the v0.8.2 build for your system from /download: Windows, macOS, Linux or the web build. The release has 26 files, including the new photocraft-0.8.2-linux-riscv64.deb and photocraft-0.8.2-linux-riscv64.rpm and SHA256SUMS.txt. Builds come only from the official GitHub release; avoid third-party mirrors. If you are coming from v0.6.0 or earlier, also read the v0.7.0 notes.

Full release notes, with every merged pull request: PhotoCraft v0.8.2 on GitHub.