photocraft/docs/target-app-parity.md

PhotoCraft vs Adobe Photoshop: target-app parity

Last reviewed: 2026-10-12 · Last updated: 2026-10-12 · Change: minor (.atn import maps 112 events; Free Transform H/V skew fields; stale rows corrected against main and the scorecard, estimates unchanged; Photoshop Actions .atn load and save; 2026-10-10: Tilt-Shift measurements added; earlier the same day: major, full re-measure against Photoshop 2026 27.11.0; merged parity-estimate.md and the roadmap's honest assessment) · Target: Adobe Photoshop 2026

The authoritative answer to "how close is PhotoCraft to Photoshop, and how much work is left". The one-page summary is ROADMAP.md; the ranked work list is gaps.md; the measured checklists are scorecard.md (cargo xtask scorecard) and parity-checklist.md (cargo xtask parity). Detail by dimension: UI, brushes and painting, context menus, file formats, hardware, localization.

Headline (2026-10-10, PhotoCraft 0.6.0, main at 3e000bc1)

Number	Value	Kind
Feature breadth (does each Photoshop feature exist?)	~76%	partly measured (menus, tools, panels, formats), weights below
Ready for real work (could a professional replace Photoshop with it?)	~45% (range 40–50%)	estimated, weights and evidence below
Mainstream practitioner (typical pro, weekly areas only)	~43% (38–48%)	estimated, method
Essentials user (core features only)	~61% (55–67%)	estimated, method
Stage	alpha	ready-for-real-work is inside the ~40–75% band and the alpha gate passes (six core workflows end to end); PSD exchange with Photoshop is not yet reliable enough for beta
Remaining to beta (~75% ready, PSD reliable)	~1,100–1,800 Opus 5.5 agent-hours	estimated, calibrated below
Remaining to full parity (~95–100%)	~2,300–4,100 Opus 5.5 agent-hours	estimated; includes AI and ecosystem, which need owner decisions

These numbers replace the 2026-10-03 estimate (82% "of the way", 140–220 agent-hours to 95%, kept below for the record). That estimate counted feature surface and was far too optimistic: about 1,230 issues have been filed since the first release (579 open on 2026-10-10), most of them against features already counted as present. The 2026-10-05 honest assessment (feature surface 60–70%, ready for real work 25–35%) was closer; ~700 merged PRs since then moved both numbers up.

Readiness by audience

Audience	Ready %	Opus 5.5 agent-hours to ~95%	Work that dominates
Full target (ready for real work)	~45% (additive weighted sum: 46%)	2,300–4,100	Everything below, plus AI tier, plug-in/scripting ecosystem, video, localization, hardware
Mainstream practitioner	~43%	1,700–2,800	Depth in the 11 weekly areas (1,180–2,000), performance budgets, stability on real machines, PSD exchange with Photoshop
Essentials user	~61%	400–700	Startup and GPU robustness, brush and transform responsiveness, Type tool, discoverability (flyouts, commit buttons), AVIF/PDF open

Hours calibrated as in Remaining effort (2–9 h per checklist item, 8–20 h per format or subsystem, from the repo's 1,004 merged PRs); each tier is a subset of the one above. About 80% parallelizes (independent crates and command modules); performance architecture and the PSD writer are the serial parts.

Target measured

• Adobe Photoshop 2026, version 27.11.0 (build 20260929.r.26, macOS universal), installed at /Applications/Adobe Photoshop 2026, with Camera Raw 18.7. Inspected without launching it: Info.plist document types, the file-format plug-ins' PiPL read/write flags, .lproj and Locales/ language packs, Default Keyboard Shortcuts.kys (67 toolbox tools, 107 menu commands with default shortcuts), Required/ plug-ins (85 filter entries, 12 format plug-ins), presets, and strings in the main binary (81 "… Tool" titles; HDR/EDR, Metal, Touch Bar, pen features).
• PhotoCraft's own Photoshop menu tree (crates/ui-egui/src/menu_catalog.rs, 628 items on 2026-10-10, 631 on 2026-10-12) was written from Photoshop's menus; it is the denominator of the menu number. Photoshop's binary Default Menus.mnu was not parsed, so items added in 27.x that the catalog lacks would not show (Generative and cloud items are the likely ones).
• User reports on GitHub (storytold/photocraft, 579 open issues on 2026-10-10) as evidence of depth and feel. Adobe's documentation and release notes for behaviour not visible in the bundle.

Feature breadth: ~76% (weighted)

Component	Weight	Ours / Photoshop	%	Kind
Menu commands	30%	631 / 631 catalog items dispatch a live command (628 / 628 on 2026-10-10)	100%	measured (cargo xtask parity)
Toolbox tools	15%	59 / 68 (Photoshop's 67 .kys tools plus Remove, Triangle, Curvature Pen; minus legacy Rounded Rectangle and Targeted Adjustment)	87%	measured (Tool enum in ui-egui/src/state.rs, TOOL_SECTIONS in panels.rs)
Panels	10%	30 / 35 Window-menu panels	86%	measured (view_cmds.rs, panel modules)
Filters and adjustments	10%	every Filter and Image › Adjustments item live; Filter Gallery 47 looks	100%	measured (menu catalog)
File formats (usage-weighted)	15%	13 of 31 Photoshop formats supported in Photoshop's directions, 4 partial; the common ones (PSD/PSB, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, WebP) all present	~80% (48% by count)	measured list, estimated weights (file-format-parity.md)
AI / generative	10%	classical Select Subject/Sky, Remove tool, Content-Aware; no Generative Fill/Expand, Neural Filters, Sky Replacement, Super Zoom	~15%	estimated
Ecosystem (plug-ins, scripting, libraries)	10%	WebAssembly plug-ins, CLI, MCP, actions, .atn load/save (112 events); no .8BF, UXP/ExtendScript, Libraries	~20%	estimated
Weighted	100%		~76%

Ready for real work: ~45% (weighted)

Weights reflect what a working Photoshop user depends on (photographers, retouchers, designers).

Dimension	Weight	% ready	Remaining (agent-h)	Evidence	Detail
Features in depth (tools, layers, selections, type, filters, transforms)	25%	55%	600–1,000	Scorecard checklists: Tools 20 done / 15 partial / 6 missing, Type 0 / 3 / 6, Automation 3 / 2 / 6. 14 tools missing; Select and Mask, Vanishing Point and Content-Aware Fill are parameter dialogs, not workspaces; type on a path, manual kerning, RTL paragraphs missing	gaps.md
UI / UX fidelity and feel	15%	40%	350–600	~150 open UI issues; Workspace checklist 13 / 5 / 5 (2026-10-12; 5 / 7 / 11 on 2026-10-10); 27 of 156 preferences do nothing (was 46 of 149); no floating panel groups, thin Color panel, brush lag and pressure jumps reported	ui-parity.md, brush-parity.md
File formats and fidelity	15%	60%	300–500	PSD oracle on Photoshop-authored files 133/256 (52%); io corpus 146/170 (86%); psd-tools 236/309 (76%); round trips ~100% of corpus; but users report Photoshop refusing our files (#1281, #2469; a text-layer case, #2374, was fixed 2026-10-10); no Photoshop PDF, EPS, JPEG 2000, JPEG XL, AVIF read, CR3	file-format-parity.md
Performance	10%	25%	200–350	3 of 25 budgeted scenarios meet budget (baseline 2026-10-05); 150-layer nudge crashes the GPU path (P12); layer move on 15000×10000 16-bit 2.7 s p50; users report brush and cursor lag (#2619, #2566, #1994)	scorecard.md
Stability	10%	45%	150–250	Never-crash lints on 28/28 crates, panic_hunt in the gate, atomic saves; but field reports of freezes (#2518 Type tool 60 s on macOS), GPU panics (#2020, #1215), no-GPU start failures (#2519, #2412)	gaps.md
Hardware	5%	50%	80–150	GPU compositor (wgpu), pen pressure on all desktops but tilt/rotation not on Windows, Wayland pen broken (#2622), no HDR/EDR output, monitor profile auto-detected on macOS only	hardware-parity.md
Localization	5%	55%	80–140	7 of the 12 key languages at 100% of measured UI keys; Hindi and Arabic absent, Vietnamese catalog added 2026-10-12 (#2636, coverage not re-measured); no RTL UI; engine messages English	localization-parity.md
Platforms	5%	80%	30–60	macOS (notarized), Windows (unsigned), Linux (AppImage/deb/rpm/Flatpak), web, FreeBSD partial; Windows ARM64 is packaged and install-checked by .github/workflows/windows-arm64.yml (DIST-220-2); no in-app updates	scorecard.md
Ecosystem (plug-ins, scripting, presets, libraries)	5%	15%	250–450	No .8BF hosting (#2647), no UXP/ExtendScript; .atn load/save (2026-10-12, 112 events, the rest kept verbatim), .abr/.grd/.pat/.aco/.ase/.cube supported	gaps.md
AI features	5%	10%	300–600	No ML runtime at all (scorecard AUTO-219-7); classical substitutes only. Needs an owner decision and openly licensed models (#41)	gaps.md
Weighted	100%	~46%	2,340–4,100

Mainstream practitioner: ~43%

The same question for the typical professional Photoshop user (photographer, retoucher, designer), not the whole product. Method: craftrules standards/progress-docs.md. Areas a professional uses weekly (the alpha-gate workflows plus their everyday tools), depth from the feature areas table. Left out: AI, plug-ins and scripting, Libraries/cloud, video, specialist hardware (tilt, Touch Bar), languages.

Area	Weight	Depth
Layers, masks, blend modes, smart objects, styles	20%	65%
Adjustments and filters	15%	70%
Selections and masking	15%	55%
Retouching	12%	50%
Transform and warp	8%	55%
Type	8%	40%
Painting and brushes	7%	55%
Vector shapes and paths	5%	55%
Camera Raw	4%	45%
Colour management	3%	70%
Export, Save for Web	3%	50%
Weighted depth	100%	57%

Discounts for what still stops real work (estimated, each with evidence):

Discount	Factor	Evidence
Interaction fidelity	×0.92	~150 open UI issues; spring-loaded tools, panel tear-off missing (ui-parity.md); brush lag and pressure reports (brush-parity.md)
Stability and speed on real machines	×0.88	3 of 25 performance budgets met; 150-layer GPU crash (P12); Type tool freeze (#2518); GPU start failures (#2519, #2412, #2020); 41 open performance issues
Exchanging files with Photoshop users	×0.92	Photoshop-authored oracle 133/256; exports refused by Photoshop (#1281, #2469); smart-filter re-render 5/30

57% × 0.92 × 0.88 × 0.92 ≈ 43% (range 38–48), estimated.

It is not higher than ready-for-real-work (~45%) because the areas it leaves out carry little weight in the full number (AI, ecosystem, localization and hardware together 20%, averaging ~33%), while the discounts apply to every workflow. The two numbers agree within their error; the full number stays where its written weights put it.

User evidence (GitHub, 2026-10-10; search hits include maintainer replies, so they are upper bounds): 0 issues mention switching from or replacing Photoshop; praise words appear in ~19 ("love"), 10 ("amazing"), 6 ("awesome"), 4 ("great work") issues. Of 579 open issues, 136 are feature requests and 443 bugs or reports, of which ~244 are on core paths (layers, selection, brush, transform, type, save/open, performance) by title. Users are trying it for real work, and most of what they report is core-path friction, not niche requests.

Essentials user: ~61%

An occasional user who touches only the essentials: open or create a file, the most used tools and commands, undo, save and export, default settings. Excluded: advanced options, pro workflows, PSD exchange edge cases, and everything excluded above.

Core feature	Weight	Depth	Notes
Save, Save As, Export JPEG/PNG	12%	85%
Layers (add, reorder, hide, opacity)	12%	80%
New / open a photo	10%	90%
Select (marquee, lasso, magic wand, object)	10%	75%
Move and Free Transform	10%	70%	commit and cancel buttons in the options bar (#2442, closed)
Brush and eraser	10%	70%	lag with big brushes (#2619)
Undo, History	8%	90%
Basic adjustments (brightness, levels, curves, hue/saturation)	8%	80%
Crop and straighten	6%	85%
Text	6%	55%	freeze report (#2518)
Spot healing, Remove	5%	65%
Blur and sharpen filters	3%	85%
Weighted depth	100%	78%

Discounts: launch and stability ×0.90 (start failures without a usable GPU, #2519, #2412, #1859; Type tool freeze, #2518); discoverability and UI clarity ×0.92 (language option not found, #2532; flyouts only on right-click, #2301; toolbar hover issue, #2603); opening files people send ×0.95 (JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, PSD open; AVIF and PDF don't, #463, #2541). 78% × 0.90 × 0.92 × 0.95 ≈ 61% (range 55–67), estimated.

Feature areas

Percent is ready-for-real-work for that area (depth and fidelity, not presence). Hours are to full parity for the area and are already contained in the dimension rows above.

Area	%	Hours	Notes
Layers, groups, masks, blend modes, smart objects, layer styles	65%	150–250	Broad and GPU-accelerated. Open: layer clipboard between documents (UI-217-23: layer.copyToDocument exists, no copy/paste), smart-object perspective (FILE-215-6), a user contour library (FILE-215-15). Multi-layer Smart Object conversion (#2052, #2651), Stamp Visible (UI-217-22) and mask targeting by command (#2458) are done
Selections, Select and Mask, channels	55%	120–200	All selection tools, single row/column marquee included (#2837). Select and Mask is a dialog with Photoshop's view modes, a Refine Edge Brush and six outputs, not a workspace (TOOL-214-1), no Refine Hair (#2671); Select Subject/Sky classical, 559 ms p50 on 24 MP vs a 100 ms budget
Painting and brush engine	55%	150–250	Every Brush Settings section exists; feel is the gap: lag on big brushes, pressure jumps, smoothing and edge quality reports (brush-parity.md)
Retouching (healing, clone, patch, remove, content-aware)	50%	100–180	Remove tool non-generative; Content-Aware Fill has no workspace (TOOL-214-15); live stroke preview only for Brush/Eraser (TOOL-213-7)
Transform, warp, puppet, perspective, liquify	55%	100–180	Free Transform modifiers right, with a right-click transform menu (TOOL-214-5) and H/V skew fields; Puppet Warp mesh follows the object outline (TOOL-214-6); Liquify called "useless" by a user (#2606)
Adjustments and filters	70%	120–200	All present; smart-filter re-render matches Photoshop on 5 of 30 files; Filter Gallery looks approximate; no Neural Filters
Type	40%	120–200	Engine works; no type on a path, manual kerning, RTL paragraphs, OpenType panel UI, live Warp Text preview; Type tool freeze on macOS (#2518)
Vector shapes and paths	55%	80–140	Pen, Direct/Path Selection, shapes, shape strokes. Freeform and Curvature Pen (#1054). Add/Delete Anchor Point and Convert Point tools exist (Tool enum); missing on-canvas corner radius (TOOL-214-12), path-point nudge; shape parity tracking issue #2496
Colour management and modes	70%	60–100	Own ICC engine, soft proof, CMYK/Lab/Indexed/Duotone/Multichannel; no Adobe CMYK profiles, no spot plates (FILE-215-17), monitor profile only at launch
Camera Raw and computational photo (Photomerge, HDR, lens)	45%	120–200	Raw for DNG/CR2/NEF/ARW/RW2/ORF/RAF(uncompressed)/PEF; no CR3; ACR dialog partial (no masking, calibration); generic lens profiles only
Automation, actions, batch, scripting	45%	120–200	CLI/MCP/control channel ahead of Photoshop; Actions panel and recording not document-independent (AUTO-219-1/2); .atn load/save since 2026-10-12 (112 events mapped, the rest kept verbatim); no ExtendScript/UXP
File I/O	60%	300–500	See file-format-parity.md
Print, export, Save for Web	50%	60–100	JPEG Options dialog missing (FILE-215-19), no Photoshop PDF, no separations, Save for Web settings not remembered
Video / timeline, data-driven graphics	30%	100–200	Menu items live; frame model persists in .pcraft; no PSD video-layer mapping
Workspace, panels, preferences	40%	150–250	46 of 149 prefs do nothing; no floating/OS-window panel groups; Libraries, Comments, Contextual Task Bar missing
AI / generative	10%	300–600	See the dimension row

Remaining effort and calibration

Calibration. The repository's history from the first commit (2026-09-30) to 2026-10-10: 1,152 commits on main and 1,004 merged PRs in 10.5 days. Median PR open-to-merge time is 3.4 h (p75 6.4 h, p90 14.3 h; that includes CI and review queueing). Comparable features:

Feature	PRs	Lines added	PR hours
Crop tool parity set (#1919: nudge/swap/readout, overlays, Straighten, shield)	#1958, #2026, #2127, #2128	~2,050	6.5
Crop rotation (#1792)	#1879	710	2.8
Remove tool with non-local patch completion	#2193	2,005	9.0
OpenRaster open and save	#2257	1,331	8.9
Paint.NET import	#1998	1,461	7.0
Shape stroke controls	#2218	1,506	9.0
Red Eye tool	#1084	1,232	17.9
Korean catalog and live switching	#582, #604	~3,800	13.0

So one checklist item of tool or UI depth costs about 2–9 agent-hours including tests, and a new format or subsystem 8–20. With roughly 2–4 agent-hours per merged PR, the ~1,000 PRs so far represent about 2,000–4,000 agent-hours, which took ready-for-real-work from 0 to ~45%. The remaining points are harder per point (fidelity against Photoshop's unpublished maths, feel, performance on large documents, user-reported long tail), so the remaining estimate is not lower than the work already done.

Totals.

Milestone	Scope	Opus 5.5 agent-hours
Beta (~75% ready, PSD reliable)	PSD fidelity and Photoshop re-open check, the performance budgets, the user bug backlog, the 15 missing tools, Select and Mask / Content-Aware Fill workspaces, type depth, UI feel (brush, transform, panels), JPEG/PDF/AVIF/JXL formats, Hindi/Arabic/Vietnamese and RTL	1,100–1,800
Full parity	the above plus the AI tier, plug-in/scripting ecosystem, video depth, long-tail fidelity	2,300–4,100

Parallelism. About 80% parallelizes: areas are independent crates and command modules, and the repository has sustained 10–20 concurrent agents. At ~12 agents, beta is roughly 100–150 wall-clock hours. Serial parts: GPU compositor and performance architecture, the PSD writer.

Needs a human. Owner decisions on the AI backend (#41: which openly licensed models, local vs remote) and plug-in hosting (.8BF needs native code under the isolated-unsafe rule; UXP is a JavaScript runtime, which AGENTS.md forbids in the UI); Windows code-signing material; tablet hardware checks (Wacom/XP-Pen on Windows, Wayland, macOS); native-speaker review of every catalog; checking exports by opening them in Photoshop (the owner's machine has it installed).

How to re-measure

1. cargo xtask parity and cargo xtask scorecard for the measured rows.
2. Tools: diff Tool in crates/ui-egui/src/state.rs against the <tool> entries of Photoshop's Locales/en_US/Support Files/Shortcuts/Mac/Default Keyboard Shortcuts.kys.
3. Formats: Photoshop's Info.plist CFBundleDocumentTypes and the PiPL flags of Contents/PlugIns/Required/File Formats, against crates/codecs/src/format.rs and crates/io/src/lib.rs.
4. Languages: cargo xtask i18n-coverage.
5. Re-grade the estimated rows from the open issues by area and the corpus floors. Move a number only with new evidence, and add a revision-history row.

---

Earlier assessments (kept for the record)

The two sections below are superseded by the tables above. They are kept because they hold dated evidence that later numbers build on.

Feature-parity estimate of 2026-10-03 (from the former docs/parity-estimate.md)

How close PhotoCraft is to Adobe Photoshop 2026, and how much Opus 5.5 work remains. Generated by assessment, not a tool; revisit when a major arc lands. Menu coverage is from cargo xtask parity; fidelity is from the PSD oracle (cargo xtask corpus / oracle_diff).

Headline

Update 2026-10-03: menu/command breadth reached 100% (625/625) — every Photoshop menu item now dispatches a live command (incl. Variables/Data Sets, Trap, the Timeline panel and Layer › Video Layers). Remaining parity work is depth and fidelity, not breadth: PSD oracle (~66%), Camera Raw/video-layer depth, and the AI/Neural tier. See the table below.

• Menu / command breadth: 625 / 625 Photoshop menu items live = 100% (every menu item has a live command).
• PSD rendering fidelity (oracle): ~111 / 170 corpus files pixel-match = ~65%.
• Overall functional parity (weighted, mainstream workflows): ~86% (menu breadth complete; depth + fidelity are the remaining gap).
• Overall including Adobe's AI / Firefly features: ~75% (these are mostly cloud/ML and the hardest to reach clean-room).

Menu coverage (96%) overstates true parity because many live commands are faithful-but-approximate (Camera Raw without masking/calibration, Vanishing Point without its UI, heuristic Select Subject/Sky vs Adobe's ML, Content-Aware Fill basic). The weighted figure accounts for depth and fidelity, not just presence.

Where we stand, by area

Area	Parity	Notes
Layers, masks, groups, blend modes, smart objects, layer styles	~92%	Broad + GPU-accelerated; bevel/satin shapes and a few blend edge cases remain
Selections, paths, vector shapes, pen	~90%	Select menu 100% of items; Select Subject/Sky are heuristic, not ML
Paint / brush engine, retouch (clone, healing)	~85%	Solid; no Mixer Brush depth, no Content-Aware healing
Adjustments + adjustment layers	~90%	All kinds present; Camera Raw depth and a few toe-curve models approximate
Filters (incl. Filter Gallery ×47, Liquify, blurs, render)	~88%	Gallery looks are approximations; no Neural Filters
Type / text engine, character & paragraph styles, glyphs	~90%	Vertical type laid out and rendered (#199; no mojikumi or upright-Roman option yet); OpenType alternates thin
Color management (ICC v2/v4, intents, soft-proof)	~90%	Own pure-Rust CMS; no Adobe CMYK profiles (synthetic)
File I/O: PSD, native .pcraft, flats (png/jpg/tiff/webp/exr/…)	~85%	PSD oracle ~65% pixel-exact; most structure round-trips
Transform, warp, puppet, perspective, liquify	~88%	No Face-Aware Liquify (needs a landmark model)
Automation: CLI, MCP, headless server, control channel	~95%	Ahead of Photoshop here (see below)
Image modes (RGB/Gray/CMYK/Lab/Indexed/Duotone/Multichannel)	~85%	Multichannel display-only; no ink-plate model
Print / export / Save for Web / slices / Generator	~85%	No Separations/bleed; droplets basic
Computational photo (Photomerge, HDR, Lens, Camera Raw, Wide Angle)	~70%	Classical implementations; generic lens profiles only
Data-driven graphics (Variables, Data Sets)	~0%	Not started (5 menu items)
Video / Timeline / animation	~0%	Not started (13 menu items) — a whole subsystem
AI / Neural / Generative (Firefly, Sensei, Neural Filters)	~5%	Mostly absent; needs licensed/trained models
Prepress niche (Trap, measurement scale pro)	~30%	Trap, ink spread not modelled

The remaining 25 menu items, grouped

• Video & Timeline (13): Video Layers (new/insert/duplicate/delete/replace/interpret/restore/ reload/rasterize), Rasterize › Video, Timeline panel, Render Video, Import Video Frames to Layers. One cohesive subsystem: a frame/time model, a video decoder/encoder (clean-room Rust, no ffmpeg), onion-skinning, and a timeline UI.
• Data-driven graphics (5): Variables › Define / Data Sets, Apply Data Set, Export Data Sets as Files, Import Variable Data Sets. A template-binding model over layers + a CSV/data-set engine.
• Niche / platform (7): Trap (prepress ink spread), Frame from Layers, Migrate Presets, WIA Support (Windows scanners), and two already-adjacent items.

Effort to parity (Opus 5.5)

Two clocks: agent-hours (total model work) and wall-clock (with this session's observed ~6–8× parallelism across independent arcs). This session landed ~70 menu items + major subsystems in a handful of wall-clock hours using 8 parallel agents, so wall-clock ≈ agent-hours ÷ 6.

Milestone	Scope	Agent-hours	Wall-clock
To 90% functional	remaining non-AI/non-video menu items (Variables, Trap, Frame, Migrate, WIA), Camera Raw depth, Vanishing Point UI, selection quality, polish	60–90	10–15 h
To 95% functional	the above + PSD oracle 65% → ~90% (bevel/satin shapes, Lab blending, noise-gradient RNG, toe curves), broad UI-parity pass, perf pass	+80–130	+15–22 h
Video / Timeline subsystem	frame model, clean-room decode/encode, timeline, animation, Render Video	50–80	10–14 h
Credible AI tier	ML Select Subject/Sky, Content-Aware Fill (PatchMatch++), basic generative fill/expand — needs model integration; some features may be infeasible fully clean-room without licensed models	120–250+	25–45 h

Totals:

• To ~95% functional parity (everything except video and AI): ~140–220 agent-hours ≈ 25–40 wall-clock hours of Opus 5.5 with parallel agents.
• To ~98% incl. the video subsystem: +50–80 agent-hours ≈ +10–14 wall-clock hours.
• To ~99% incl. a credible AI tier: +120–250 agent-hours ≈ +25–45 wall-clock hours, with the caveat that pixel-for-pixel Firefly/Sensei parity is not achievable clean-room without trained models; we target functional equivalents.

Best single number: PhotoCraft is ~82% of the way to full Photoshop parity, and reaching a 95%, ships-for-most-users state is roughly 25–40 wall-clock hours of parallel Opus 5.5 work. Closing the last 5% (video + AI) is the long, uncertain tail.

Assumptions & caveats

• "Parity" = functional + visual equivalence of what a user can do, not byte-identical output. Clean- room means no Adobe code, profiles, shaders, or trained models; AI features target equivalents.
• Wall-clock assumes 6–8 independent arcs in parallel with their own target dirs, as this session ran. Serial work is ~6× longer.
• Adobe removed 3D/Substance from Photoshop, so 3D is intentionally out of scope.
• Fidelity hours are the least certain: the remaining oracle failures are proprietary RNGs and unpublished curve models fitted by observation.

Honest parity assessment of 2026-10-05, with dated evidence to 2026-10-10 (from the former section of docs/roadmap.md)

This is the reference answer to "how close are we to Photoshop parity, really". Agents: read it before picking work. Update it (with dated measurements) when the numbers move; don't restate the menu-parity number in its place.

Measured numbers live in the scorecard (cargo xtask scorecard, kept current by CI): performance scenarios against their budgets, corpus floors, per-area checklists with done / partial / missing counts, and the number of settings that do nothing. Where the scorecard and the estimates below disagree, the scorecard's numbers supersede them. As of 2026-10-05 it counts 67 of 129 preferences that nothing reads; 3 of the 25 budgeted performance scenarios meet their #209–#211 targets (first baseline, taken on a heavily loaded machine), and the 150-layer nudge scenario crashes the GPU compositor; the open area issues' checklists (#203–#220) are almost entirely missing or partial.

2026-10-07: UI Font Size now applies to interface text, including CJK fallbacks, independently of display and canvas zoom (#532). The current preference audit drops from 59 to 58 unread settings out of 135; see the regenerated scorecard.

2026-10-09: Output-preserving Radial Blur direct sampling measured on a local i7-9750H, 12 workers, 24 MP RGBA8, Good quality, amount 1: Spin 66.10 → 16.43 s (4.02×), Zoom 19.19 → 5.35 s (3.59×), one paired run each, exact output equality. These are local measurements at amount 1; see method and limits.

2026-10-10: native selection distance transforms measured 7.59–10.57x faster on six 24–36 MP synthetic masks on an AWS c7i.4xlarge (16 workers, three paired release runs). The transform also corrects f32 envelope errors past coordinate 4096, including nonzero distances at selected pixels. The parallel path needs an additional four bytes per pixel; see measurements, correctness and limits.

Bottom line. Two days after 0.2.0 we had merged ~96 PRs and closed ~48 issues, but real Photoshop parity is still well below 50%. The biggest gaps are AI, missing tools, professional workflow depth and the plug-in ecosystem. Most fixes since 0.2.0 have passed our tests but have not yet been validated by users, and this week proved our tests miss what users hit: on first public use they found broken basics (text selection offset, 214 shortcut failures, panels resizing themselves, an immovable crop frame, folders that wouldn't collapse, lag on layout PSDs) that all counted as "live" in parity-checklist.md.

Overall. Feature surface: roughly 60–70% of what a typical Photoshop user touches exists in some form. "A professional could switch for daily work": roughly 25–35%. True 1:1 parity is many months of focused work, and some areas need product decisions rather than effort. Confidence: moderate — the next users of 0.2.x will move these numbers either way.

By dimension

2026-10-10: Tilt-Shift reuses the established contiguous premultiplication and per-level trailing-halo trimming. Nine local 24 MP RGB U8/U16/F32 cases improve 1.07–1.49× with separated observed ranges (Ryzen 7 9700X, Windows, eight workers): default blur 15, 609.5 → 451.7 ms; rotated blur 80, 1729.3 → 1241.4 ms. At 36 MP, rotated blur 80: 2458.7 → 1668.0 ms; the saturated-field gain is inconclusive. The existing filtered preview proxy at document blur 80/300 improves from 66.9/179.4 → 55.9/132.8 ms; its default blur 15 gain is inconclusive. Finite pixel bits match the frozen starting kernel exactly. These are computation timings with two baseline rounds, not GUI frame latency or a Photoshop parity increase; see method, upstream SIMD/rustfft investigation and full ranges.

2026-10-10: Iris Blur pin preparation, saturated-distance evaluation and trailing Gaussian-level halo trimming measure 1.18–1.76× faster across eight local 24 MP RGB U8/U16/F32 cases (Ryzen 7 9700X, Windows, eight workers). Default blur 15: 626.8 → 426.9 ms; two pins: 1789.9 → 1016.2 ms. The default 1500×1000 filtered proxy for 24 MP, document blur 15/80: 28.7/51.8 → 24.9/42.6 ms. At 36 MP, two pins: 2595.8 → 1822.8 ms; small/medium U8 gains are inconclusive. Differential tests preserve exact finite pixel bits. These are computation timings, not GUI frame latency or new Photoshop parity; see measurements, upstream SIMD findings and limits.

2026-10-10: Quick Selection object strokes through raster surfaces measured 3.46-3.70x faster at 8-bit, 16-bit and 32f on 24-36 MP documents (AWS c7i.4xlarge, five paired release runs), with identical region bounds and mask bytes. Hybrid FIFO push/relabel and sparse edge enumeration preserve the fitted energy. See stroke measurements and reproduction.

2026-10-10: Pixelate's Facet shares exact 3x3 quadrant statistics and Color Halftone shares dot radii within each rotated screen grid. Full tiled CPU application at 24 MP on a 16-vCPU m7i.4xlarge improves Facet from 0.684 s to 0.312 s in RGB8 (2.20x), and from 7.888 s to 0.574 s in CMYK8 (13.74x). Color Halftone improves from 1.137 s to 0.604 s in RGB8 (1.88x) and from 3.589 s to 0.718 s in Lab8 (5.00x). Three alternating paired release runs also cover 36 MP RGB, 16/32-bit storage, and screen radii 2/8/64. All 36 complete output comparisons match exactly. See method, raw timings and checks.

2026-10-10: Native CMYK solid and gradient fills share depth-quantized samples between rendering and PSD export. The uncached 16-bit CMYK gradient now round-trips with zero rendered error; psd-tools round trips rise from 307 to 308. Mixed and Photoshop round trips remain 169 and 258; rendering oracle counts remain 146, 237 and 133. Exact 8-bit CMYK row reuse reduces 1 MP conversion-read time by 77% for smooth ramps, 33% with dithering and 10% for random colours (M4 Max, release optimization level 3).

2026-10-10: Shape stroke controls expose existing Solid/Dashed/Dotted, custom dash/gap, offset, caps, joins, alignment, miter-limit and opacity capabilities in Shape/Pen options and Properties. Properties stages a cached canvas preview before one undoable edit. Gradient fill controls from #1053 remain open; the Line tool still draws a filled bar. This extends UI reachability and does not claim Photoshop-authored stroke parity.

Dimension	Measured / evidence (2026-10-05)	Grade	Notes
Menu wiring	626/626 menu items dispatch a command (parity-checklist.md)	high but shallow	Says nothing about behaviour.
PSD fidelity (rendering)	Corpus oracle 115/170 (68%): 30 differ, 26 have no usable reference, 1 import error. 2026-10-07: io corpus 146/170, psd-tools corpus 236/309 (was 229: Advanced Blending knockouts), Photoshop oracles 132/258	medium	Push to 170/170 under way (effects/strokes, multi-instance effects, 16/32-bit and colour modes, references for skipped files).
PSD round trip	169/169 re-import identically; every adjustment layer and blend mode round-trips	high (within corpus)	Floors in crates/io/tests/corpus.rs; raise, never lower. Corpora: cargo xtask corpus --all (ours: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft-corpus).
OpenRaster read/write	2026-10-09: 34 Krita 5.2.9-authored .ora files (27 blend modes, groups, pass-through, offsets, opacity, visibility, masks, 16-bit, gray) render within 3/255 of Krita's merged image (30) or differ for known reasons (4: Krita's lighter/darker-colour tie-break, Hard Mix at exactly 1, a linear-light 16-bit document); Krita re-opens our exports and renders them identically to its originals (33/34; Soft Light is written as svg:soft-light)	medium (one authoring app)	MyPaint and GIMP files untested. Masks are applied to pixels and layer styles dropped on save (reported). See OpenRaster.
Paint.NET import	2026-10-09: 14/14 local PDN3 textures preserve editable layers exactly through .pcraft and render within 2.142/255 of full-size previews; a supplied 5.x document (1280×720, 11 layers) passes editing/history/native saves and matches its thumbnail within 0.418/255 mean; all 14 blend modes exercised synthetically	medium (limited corpus)	Import only; metadata omitted. More current-version files and full-size exports needed. See PDN support.
Smart filters / text / effect shapes in PSDs	Measured on our Photoshop-authored set (https://github.com/storytold/photocraft-corpus, corpus/photoshop, 258 files): see the per-group floors in crates/io/tests/corpus.rs and crates/engine/tests/photoshop_oracles.rs. Smart objects and smart filters now survive PSD save and open (41 corpus files, 206 smart objects, round trip strict; Photoshop opens our exports with live filters); re-rendering Photoshop's smart filters with ours matches 5/30 (was 1/30)	low–medium	Remaining re-render gaps are filter maths (Gaussian/Motion Blur, Unsharp Mask, Emboss, Add Noise RNG) and bicubic placement.
Core editing (layers, masks, selections, adjustments, filters, transforms)	Broad engine coverage; many interaction bugs fixed after 0.2.0 (adjustment dialogs, Curves, crop, Move/Transform modifiers, gesture origin)	medium	Fixes not yet user-validated.
UI / UX polish	Shortcut audit 214 → 0 failures; dock, Layers rows and menus reworked; first visual-QA sweep found 14 defects (#147–#157). 2026-10-07: the keyboard-only shortcuts with no menu item (⌥[ ⌥] ⌥, ⌥. layer navigation, ⇧⌥[ ⇧⌥] to extend the selection, 1–0 for opacity and ⇧ for flow or fill, ⇧[ ⇧] hardness, ⌥⌘T to transform a copy and ⌥⇧⌘T to step and repeat), ⌥-click colour sampling with painting tools, double-click a Layers row for Layer Style, File › New from Clipboard, a centred main window and remembered Liquify settings (#352, #417, #350, #368, #419, #418). 2026-10-09: canvas zoom is physical at any display scale — 100% is one document pixel per physical display pixel, and every screen-space overlay, cursor, scrollbar, navigator and fit follows it (#1943)	low–medium	Needs recurring visual QA with realistic documents.
Tools	2026-10-10: Pencil, Mixer Brush, Color Replacement, Patch, Content-Aware Move, Vertical Type, Pattern Stamp and Rotate View are toolbar tools. Remaining missing tools include Red Eye, Art History Brush and Frame (Perspective Crop landed 2026-10-10, #1043: image.perspectiveCrop)	low–medium	Patch has a live healing preview. Content-Aware Move is partial: Move/Extend, Structure/Color and Sample All Layers exist; Transform On Drop and a live result preview remain missing (TOOL-213-4 in the scorecard). Magic/Background Eraser added; live gradients in progress (#180). Magnetic Lasso added 2026-10-08 (live-wire edge tracing, Width/Contrast/Frequency, select.magneticLasso). Pattern Stamp added 2026-10-08 (S flyout, paint.patternStamp, Aligned / Impressionist). Rotate View (2026-10-09) turns the canvas camera around its centre without rewriting pixels; Reset View and Match Rotation copy the angle. Crop rotation (2026-10-09, #1792): dragging outside the crop frame turns it (⇧ 15° steps, angle readout), and ↵ rotates the document and crops in one undo step (image.crop angle); the frame turns over the image as in Photoshop's Classic Mode, and the options-bar Straighten is still missing.
Painting	Brush model and Brush Settings panel near Photoshop; .abr/.grd import; persistent presets; pen pressure/tilt on Windows, web, macOS and X11	medium	Native Wayland pen input open (#79; a pen opens the window through Xwayland meanwhile); X11 pressure confirmed by a user, macOS not yet verified on tablet hardware.
Text / typography	Engine works; caret placement and size editing fixed; OpenType features, text-on-path editing, composer parity partial	medium-low	Measure with the Photoshop-authored set.
Colour management	Colour-managed canvas (document → monitor), embedded CMYK profiles, linear EXR/HDR, 16-bit float canvas	medium-high	Monitor profile follows only at launch.
Performance	14k+ px on the GPU at ~⅓ the memory; adjustment preview 285 ms → 4–9 ms; font-size edits 297 ms → 4.6 ms; 2026-10-07: 30 MP TIFF open (banded, parallel strip/tile decode) Deflate 345 → 32 ms, LZW 428 → 43 ms, BigTIFF and every IFD readable; 2026-10-09: 4.2 MP Indexed Color, 256 colours, full-resolution CPU preview p50 3018 → 1061 ms (Ryzen AI 7 350, three measured runs; GPU upload excluded); 2026-10-10: Liquify 3500×2200, 800 px brush, visible 1:1 crop 3.20 → 3.63 ms p50 (5 runs) while refreshing ~9× as many pixels	medium-high on rasters	Complex layout documents still laggy (#125/#128); >16384 px GPU tiling in progress (#49). Liquify now displays source-resolution detail above 100% zoom; its ≤1 ms update target is not met (3.73 ms p95 on a Windows run; GPU upload excluded). Native Indexed Color previews run on one background worker with stale-result rejection; large palettes can still take about a second to compute. Web previews remain synchronous.
Stability	Never-crash lint series, crash guard, panic_hunt fuzzing in the gate	medium-high	No field crash data yet.
Camera RAW	DNG, CR2, Sony ARW (lossless + compressed), Nikon NEF (lossless + lossy compressed), RW2, uncompressed ORF; 2026-10-09: uncompressed Fujifilm RAF, Bayer and X-Trans (edge-directed X-Trans demosaic; 26 MP X-Trans develop 306 ms on 12 cores)	medium	CR3, compressed RAF and Nikon "lossy after split" still open (#50). Non-DNG cameras have no calibration: their colour (matrix + tone curve) is fitted per file to the camera's embedded JPEG, with the neutral sRGB-primaries fallback when the fit doesn't clearly help (2026-10-08: 8 D3200 NEFs, mean ΔE vs the camera JPEG 11.6–26.0 → 1.0–7.5); measured per-model calibration still open.
AI / generative	none	~0%	Deferred by decision (#41).
Ecosystem	Sandboxed WebAssembly plug-ins instead of .8BF; .atn actions load and save (2026-10-12); no ExtendScript/UXP; no Adobe Fonts/Libraries/cloud docs	low	By design for 8BF; scripting compatibility open.
Platforms	macOS (notarized), Windows, Linux (AppImage/deb/rpm/Flatpak bundle), web	medium-high	Flathub later (#173); Windows signing material pending.
Localisation	2026-10-07: 10 UI languages; menu, tl!, blend mode, preference and brush-section coverage enforced by tests; live switching and scoped Preferences previews	medium	Engine errors/status messages still partly English; CJK web fonts, browser-locale detection, and RTL remain open.

2026-10-08: Motion Blur adds adaptive FFT convolution for wide streaks while retaining the row kernel merged in #902 for shorter streaks and unsupported cases. Native release medians of three paired runs on an Intel i7-9750H with 12 Rayon workers, synthetic RGBA8 at 30° / distance 1000: 24 MP 22.594 → 9.785 s (2.31×), and 1.5 MP 2.455 → 0.592 s (4.15×). Full-image comparisons differ by at most one U8 code level; distance 64/256 retain the byte-identical row output. These measure decode/halo/filter/write/prune, excluding UI proxy creation, compositing and upload; the UI remains synchronous. FFT work is scheduled within a conservative 512 MiB working-set estimate, excluding stored Surface tiles and row fallback memory. The crossover is a heuristic; images dominated by near-cutoff alpha can need extra scalar work. These measurements do not establish Photoshop filter parity.

2026-10-10: Proximity Match search medians on an AWS c7i.4xlarge improved 1.54–3.82x for four synthetic stroke regions (50–300 px holes), with identical source displacements. Bounding the mask table to the hole and pruning losing SSD candidates reduced table storage by about 90–93 percent there. Full 24–36 MP kernel inputs improved 4.60–6.24x, but normal engine strokes already use a cropped region. See method and limits.

2026-10-09: the Remove tool is in the J flyout (paint.remove, a background job). A stroke around an object also removes what it encloses. The fill is non-local patch completion with texture features (A. Newson et al., IPOL 2017: crates/algo/src/nonlocal.rs), finished by a best-patch copy and gradient-domain seam hiding. On 20 holes in public-domain photos (remove_quality, docs/development.md › Remove Tool quality) the fill keeps 0.89 of the original's texture (Wexler/PatchMatch completion as Content-Aware Fill uses it: 0.54). On a 24 MP document a 100 px ring takes 120 ms and a 1000 px ring 2.5 s (remove_bench). It is not generative: large objects over complex structure fill less convincingly than Photoshop's AI mode (#41). 2026-10-12: the options bar has Photoshop's three options: Sample All Layers, Create a new layer (the fill lands on a new layer above the target, paint.remove newLayer) and Remove after each stroke; off, the strokes collect as a tint and ↩ (or ✓) applies them together as one job and one undo step (strokes), Esc (or ⊘) drops them (#1750).

2026-10-08: the tools update above is checked against the current toolbar groups in panels.rs, the Pencil and tool-cycle tests in pencil_tests.rs, Patch's live-preview test in patch_preview.rs, and Vertical Type's point/paragraph creation and undo test in type_tool_tests.rs. These implementations remove the tools from the missing list; they do not establish Photoshop behavioural parity. The historical estimates and corpus measurements in this assessment are unchanged; current measured floors remain in the scorecard.

2026-10-08: GPU lower-stack checkpoints reuse unchanged composites after property edits. On a dense 24 MP / 12-layer stack, warm top-layer opacity edits at 8/16/32-bit depth measured p50 229/228/186 → 31/25/26 ms (AMD Radeon 860M, Windows, Vulkan; synchronized compositor only, bench_stack_reuse). Gains in the existing 20 MP P2–P5 canvas fixture were small and run-order sensitive: a reversed-order repeat measured p50 13.2/13.2/12.0/8.2 → 12.5/12.2/12.0/8.0 ms; P5 p95 remains 13.7 ms, above its 10 ms budget. One checkpoint is capped at 512 MiB within the existing total budget; the 24 MP run held 384 MB. Planning and output/mipmap work remain. These local comparisons do not replace the published baseline or enable budget enforcement on other hardware.

2026-10-07: Camera Raw PSD mapping covers relative custom white balance, Light/Presence, parametric and four point curves, HSL, Color Grading, sharpening/noise detail, grain and numeric post-crop vignette controls. Two revisions of one supplied Photoshop ACR 18.4 PSD preserve their filter descriptors without edits. The updated revision stays opaque because of active manual Optics and unverified vignette style; a descriptor projection verifies its supported controls. Synthetic 8/16/32-bit PSD → edit → .pcraft → PSD tests preserve the filter stack, mask and undo/redo. Unmapped Camera Raw fields/versions remain opaque; Photoshop acceptance of generated exports and pixel parity are still unverified. Corpus floors above are unchanged.

2026-10-10: Select and Mask's Shift Edge now computes the exact octagonal footprint with a square window extreme plus a dyadically built Manhattan ball. On a c7i.4xlarge (16 vCPUs), full tiled CPU refinement at radius 64 / Shift Edge +100% takes 3.019 s -> 0.762 s at 24 MP (3.96x), 3.706 s -> 0.921 s at 36 MP (4.02x). Three alternating paired release runs include guide sampling, guided filtering, boundary distances, quantization and assembly. Every output mask matches exactly. The dense fractional 24 MP radius-64 dilation kernel improves 36.00x; circular soft-mask kernels improve 20.76-172.16x at 24-36 MP, radii 4-64. Bounded halo tiles reduce the large-mask workspace allocation bound from 192/288 MB to about 115/163 MB, including output and 16 workers' scratch, excluding the source. See method and results.

2026-10-10: five CPU imaging algorithms now reuse source work and interpolation. On an m7i.4xlarge (16 vCPUs), three alternating paired release runs measured dense Extrude Blocks (8/128 px, 24 MP RGB8) 160.301 s -> 0.387 s (414.69x); Blast (24 MP CMYK8) 6.231 s -> 0.709 s (8.79x); Spin Blur (36 MP RGB8) 9.439 s -> 5.869 s (1.61x); Lens Correction (24 MP CMYK16) 0.808 s -> 0.565 s (1.43x); Trap (50 px, 36 MP CMYK16) 4.627 s -> 1.333 s (3.47x). Default 30/30 px Extrude is 6.26x faster at 24 MP. All 72 full-operation output comparisons match exactly, including alpha, across 24 cases and 8/16/32-bit depths. Timers include surface assembly but exclude UI, undo and Trap document flattening. See method, raw measurements and reproduction.

Where we're going (priority order)

1. Ship the fixes: cut 0.2.1 once the current batch lands, so users validate them.
2. PSD fidelity to 170/170 with round trips, plus the Photoshop-authored reference set for smart filters, the text engine and effect shapes (https://github.com/storytold/photocraft-corpus, fetched by cargo xtask corpus --all); enforce floors in corpus.rs.
3. Workflow acceptance tests: 30–50 real tasks (retouch a portrait, social post with text and effects, composite with masks and adjustment layers, CMYK print prep…) scripted end to end and checked against Photoshop's output on every build. Their pass rate becomes the headline parity number.
4. Tool coverage and workflow depth: Pen variants (Direct Selection landed, #790; Add/Delete Anchor Point, #1044); finish Content-Aware Move's Transform On Drop and live result preview. Pencil, Mixer Brush, Patch, Vertical Type, Pattern Stamp and Rotate View are already available on the toolbar.
5. Complex-document performance (#125/#128) and GPU tiling beyond the texture limit (#49).
6. Recurring visual QA (cargo run -p photocraft-engine --example designer_psd) and fast turnaround on user reports (OS, document size, layer count, screenshot).
7. Later / needs decisions: generative AI backend (#41), scripting compatibility (ExtendScript / UXP / .atn), Flathub (#173), Wayland pen pressure (#79).

Revision history

Date	Change	Summary
2026-10-12	minor	Free Transform options bar H/V skew fields; percentages unchanged
2026-10-12	minor	.atn import: 112 events mapped (TrueGrit Texture Supply sets play end to end); percentages unchanged
2026-10-12	minor	Photoshop Actions .atn load and save (90 events mapped both ways); percentages unchanged
2026-10-12	minor	Rows checked against main and the regenerated scorecard: menu count 631, Workspace checklist and preference count, transform context menu, Puppet Warp mesh, Select and Mask, anchor-point tools, Smart Object conversion, Stamp Visible, mask targeting, Free Transform commit/cancel, Vietnamese catalog, Windows ARM64; percentages, weights and hours not re-measured
2026-10-10	minor	Added measured Tilt-Shift computation/filtered-proxy gains and inconclusive cases; parity percentages and budgets unchanged
2026-10-10	minor	Readiness-by-audience table: percent and hours for full, mainstream and essentials; full number confirmed as the additive weighted sum over dimensions (46%, reported ~45%)
2026-10-10	minor	Added mainstream-practitioner (~43%) and essentials-user (~61%) numbers with written weights and discounts; full ready-for-real-work rechecked against its written weights (46%, reported ~45%), unchanged
2026-10-10	minor	Stage checked against the core-workflow alpha gate in roadmap.md: passes
2026-10-10	major	Full re-measure against Photoshop 2026 27.11.0 (installed bundle inspected); two numbers, weights, per-dimension and per-area hours calibrated from git history; merged parity-estimate.md and the roadmap's honest assessment into this file
2026-10-05	major	Honest parity assessment in docs/roadmap.md: surface 60–70%, ready for real work 25–35%
2026-10-03	major	docs/parity-estimate.md: menu breadth 625/625, weighted ~82–86%