Can Adobe Survive? (Claude Cloned Everything and it’s Free)

Hey guys, so I've got some news for you in case you haven't heard. Basically, a bunch of guys released a cloned version of all the software from Adobe for free and it will work on Linux and, you know, Mac and a PC. What's interesting about this is that they didn't basically copy illegally, you could say, pirated the software. They actually wrote the code from scratch using Rust. So, you know, with the help of AI. and they are essentially created you could say new apps that are pretty much mimicking what adobe's apps are doing is that legal is that not legal there's a lot of gray area but yeah essentially that's what they've done they just cloned these apps and they made apps that look and essentially in function the same way that adobe apps function and actually it's not just adobe products now they've actually started copying microsoft apps like microsoft word So I'm sure they're going to be doing other things like that in the future. Also what's kind of cool about it is that again it's open source you can go to github you can get all the the code essentially you can make your own versions of it or you can contribute to you know this open source project and you can kind of build on it make it better. But for me what I was really curious in is how well do these apps really work. So let's jump on the computer and let's kind of test them all out. So to get started you're gonna go to artcraft.com and once you're there you can navigate to the craft apps and you can download here just download the launcher and then from there you'll have links to all this stuff and then once you have that installed you'll start up the launcher which is you know this is what i have up here. This will actually show you here also about all your updates and stuff like that and essentially this is these are the apps that you have so you have photocraft so it says image editing like photoshop, vector craft which copies essentially adobe illustrator then you have FilmCraft which is another copy of Adobe Premiere Pro, LightCraft which copies Adobe Lightroom, PDFCraft which is like Adobe Acrobat and this one's actually really cool, I've already used it to edit some of my PDFs and then you have the effects craft which is basically Adobe After Effects and you have DesignCraft which is Adobe InDesign and then you can see like there's other apps now already like WordCraft which is like Microsoft Word or DeckCraft which copies Microsoft PowerPoint, then you have GridCraft which is Microsoft Excel, then you have CadCraft which copies Autodesk software so Autodesk AutoCAD and then SoundCraft this one's actually going to be, I haven't installed it yet so I'm going to kind of play around with it later maybe do a follow-up video but essentially copies Avid Pro Tools which is, if you know anything about it that's like the industry I would say software for sound or music basically engineering and mixing and all that stuff recording but anyways let's start off with PhotoCraft so if you can see there's already new updates and as you can see I mean it looks very similar to Photoshop, you know some of the icons are a little bit different, I know there's some little things like some of the naming is a bit different but um let's open uh for example here this thing I was working on so this is on my old uh Photoshop file that I did in Adobe Photoshop and uh if I click it and you can see I can open it and i can see all of my layers up here all of my effects that i've added right like the the shadows and bevels and all that stuff so all that stuff is in there i can go you know edit my test i don't know whatever you can see i can make all those changes that i want um let's kind of play around with some of the other ones i have for example the effects here for you know for these two layers but i'm gonna hide these two layers completely i have effects essentially on the image so you can see i have my thing and then i have my masking that i did for it so but let's say i'll for example edit that i mean change that uh let me do for example duplicate the layer now as you can see I'm very familiar with this and the reason is because well I mean I've used this a little bit over the weekend but again there was no learning curve at all because it's essentially the same as Photoshop so which I know so that's why I'm able to kind of jump in right away and start using it you know like you have all your filters here that you can do for example let me do try like the liquify now that's one thing that I when I was testing it is still not that great there's some workarounds for it but as essentially like if I just use the regular sort of brush. So now for example, you know, I'm gonna adjust the size of my brush and I don't know, let's say I wanna make my chin look bigger. You'll notice that it's kind of like, it's just not as smooth I found. Although here I gotta admit over the weekend, like I see already the update that I just installed right now, see already fixed a lot of this. So, oh yeah, definitely works a lot better. You can see there because before essentially when I was testing it over the weekend, just essentially did not deform the grid properly and it created like these sort of rough edges. But I fixed it by using the smoothing, you know, brush tool over it. So that's kind of one way, you know, that was a workaround. But I can see already over the last basically three days, I guess they noticed this. I don't know if people are complaining about it. And they have updated this. So that's kind of cool. So yeah, anyways, I added myself a massive chin. This is the before and the after like if i add one of the the adjustment layers right so let me do things let me maybe do curves or the hue saturation so you know i can bump up let me turn off the other adjustment layers i have so here i can adjust it you can see change the hue adjust the lightness all that stuff i can add another layer levels for example and you'll notice again like most of these things like small changes in the way the little icons look and stuff but otherwise yeah i mean it's it's pretty good so you know again you can be very familiar with this if you know how to use uh you know adobe photoshop so yeah but anyways this is sort of as you can see all these tools how they work and the cool thing is that now i can go and i can save it as and i can save it as a psd or psb file or they have their own proprietary photocraft basically file format and then you know the other sort of standard format so you can do all those things but yeah i mean again i'm actually surprised now because i was going to say that liquify when i was trying it over the weekend but the liquify tool was just it wasn't very smooth created these jagged edges but then you could actually fix it by by smoothing it right in Liquify but now i noticed that they already updated this so it's gonna be interesting to see how fast they provide these updates and all that stuff and how fast they kind of get the software to be like really on par with uh with you know with actually with with Photoshop um like if i create a new layer here and let's say grab a pen tool and grab a pen that i have stylus and uh you know just painting on it i mean it's very smooth and i and i can tell you that like even now noticing it and let me turn up this and let me for example oh yeah let me do the adjustment layer that i have adjusted a bit more make those make it really contrasty let's say i really want to like darken those areas so i can take this invert it and now that it's inverted i'm going to just basically paint a mask over it so i want to just kind of let's say darken those windows there and let's see how well because before when I was doing this it was just a little choppy especially working on my laptop actually on my laptop what made me is work it was you could see the performance was not on par with Photoshop you just needed a more powerful machine now this is my desktop and it's you know and it's uh it's a good machine so it has uh it shouldn't have those issues but anyway let's see now increase the brush let's see yeah it still has a little bit of I find it like a little bit more choppy than than it was with uh when i did it basically in photoshop so not a big difference though and i can see that's already been improved but yeah so like let's say if i wanted to you know paint the mask on this you know darken my gray beard here so yeah it's still again it's not perfectly like an exact copy of photoshop and one of the big things actually is like right now plugins that you have in photoshop they're they're basically photoshop plugins will not work with this because essentially, like I said, it's a different software. It's written from the ground up differently. So that's not going to be compatible. So if you do have some plugins that are your favorites, then you're going to have to be using Photoshop because again, this doesn't allow you to do that. But anyways, that's how this works. I'm going to save this. Let's try, for example, this one, Filmcraft, Adobe Premiere, essentially. And as you can see, you have like a little here like a little test you know edit project this is sort of how it looks this has a bunch of random stuff and graphics but i can import footage so import some stuff now these are all clips from an actually an ai video that i did a while back for art list so yeah i'm just gonna dump these here on the timeline and kind of see you know how fast i guess it works at let's say default transition so yeah let's see here now how this looks you can see i mean you know it's playing a video obviously it's gonna play it properly but um yeah does the transition in real time now i'll tell you that it does get very laggy like sometimes sometimes it plays smoothly and then sometimes it's just yeah it's just weird it does not perform very well like let's try to do like this kind of a cut like in this case okay it works but i can go up here for example and i can you know adjust the scale and do all those things that you'd normally be able to do let's see actually here we go scale to frame size yeah you can see you have all these the same options yeah there's a lot of like this one i would say it's not as close to actual adobe photoshop i mean adobe premiere as the photoshop one is um and again i'm sure it's going to get improved over time maybe they'll even surpass it or add some other cool features to it but yeah right now can you do editing in this yeah you can definitely edit in this version of the software but is it going to to be as powerful as you know uh premiere or which i would say is even more way more powerful uh davinci resolve no it's it's not but again instead of again it's free it allows you to plug in an ai agent and do a lot of things with it so if you're going to be using it for that kind of workflow or if you just simply like you're just done with adobe you don't want to pay subscription anymore and i guess you know this just gives you another option and it's going to be interesting to see how they improve it over time. Like I said you know there's already been some updates installed and this has only been basically less than a week that it's been released so yeah it's gonna be interesting to see kind of what happens with the software but yeah as you can see you can do you know your basic editing you can do but again keep in mind that you cannot right now put any plugins right there or native Adobe Premiere plugins into this. Now you do have some for example effects so if i can do like let's say a Lumetri color let's drop it on this and then here in effects control i can adjust right there for Lumetri i can change the temperature of the shot the tint all those things exposure and let's say i'll make it crazy over thing but then i'm gonna try to pull back the highlights so you know this is uh without Lumetri with Lumetri applied and let's see it plays you know real time so right now when you want to save it you can only save it in their own proprietary you know file which is FilmCraft project and the same thing when it comes to opening it if you're going to open a project you cannot open any other format so you cannot actually bring in an Adobe Premiere project file into this i'm sure they're going to have something where you can import things but you know yeah right now we can only import like the footage right so let's see we have other things yeah you can only import see like media files but they don't give you an option to import like even like an XML i don't see if you can import that uh let's try to do which one is going to be well PDF I mean I can I can try it just to show you but yeah you can open a PDF like this one that I was looking at from a video game and yeah I mean you can edit things you can you know again PDF you can you can you know highlight things you can add text you can draw on it right on the on the PDF like yeah you can do all this stuff so I'm not going to get into it but this seems to work pretty much like in Adobe Acro you know Acrobat so um yeah if you ever wanted to get that well now you can have all those functionality you know and for free uh EffectCraft so you know it'll be After Effects let's open this and let's see how this works um so it kind of gives you like you can open like a open demo project and yeah I'm not going to be playing around with it right now because essentially again it has the same limitation as the film craft application has which is you cannot open a thing like for example you can import an Adobe Premiere Pro project which is interesting uh but you cannot for example open the you know Adobe After Effects projects you can only do their native you know EffectCraft the project file and the same thing when you're saving right now again I am pretty sure they're going to be adding all of that but you know again it's been less than a week that this has been released but yeah you have all your things like you have the same kind of functionality you can see the layout is the same like all of these here for the different swatches effects like yeah I mean it operates the same as After Effects a lot of the same features and like you know when you're just navigating through it it looks the same but yeah i'll tell you right away that it does not have uh like i said you cannot open native After Effects you know project files and you cannot use any of their plugins and that's where that's where i would say you know the power of After Effects is there's already this huge industry with really cool you know effects you know plugins for this software and that's really what makes you know After Effects so powerful so now knowing that this software doesn't have any of those things now yeah that puts it way below right on the scale of usability but maybe and i mean if this becomes popular i don't see why third-party developers wouldn't develop it for let's say for After Effects and for this right there uh their their plugins their effects because you know it's the same thing kind of like what happened with Blender right Blender that I use for 3D graphics. It's kind of already built a big industry around it of other developers developing add-ons for Blender. And even though it's an open source software, it's created, like I said, this big industry around it of people doing these cool add-ons and features that you can add, which makes Blender then a lot more powerful. So I'm pretty sure the same thing is gonna happen here with Effect Craft but again it's less than a week old so take it for what it is but yeah that's it like this is right now as you can see they have the WordCraft which is uh uh you know Microsoft Word essentially copies on yeah there's a lot of stuff and again it's simple you know it's free so install the launcher play around with it and let me know and others what you think about this so now getting back to the sort of overall concept idea behind this I mean, you know, is it good or is it bad? Again, let me know maybe in the comments section below your opinions. I'm kind of mixed about this like in general even with the whole world of AI that we kind of live in with right now. I can't say I'm against it completely and I'm not all for it because I've seen good and bad sides of AI. Like the cool thing about you know Artcraft and kind of what they've done is essentially they created you know open source software so you can go to to github if you want and you can fork it you can build on top of it um you know you can sort of you know like the whole do the whole vibe coding thing and and try to see what you can come up with and i and i would not be surprised if this is something that's going to become a trend and uh and a lot of these apps are going to just keep on getting developed and it kind of reminds me of sort of what happened with blender right it's an open source software uh you know again if you're not in the, let's say if you just don't have the budget to pay for like the software that I used to use before that was Autodesk Maya. And, you know, I would say Blender, I can't say that it really replaced, you know, Autodesk Maya. Definitely Maya has its own sort of unique features built into it. But then again, you know, Blender started differently. They weren't necessarily trying to copy other software. They just sort of created their own open source kind a 3D package. And I gotta say, though, that it's changed a lot. From the first version to now 5.2, Blender has really gotten a lot of really cool features that now Maya doesn't have, which is a very expensive licensed software that you have to get. And this is open source for free, although if you are using Blender, definitely donate to it, because I think it is a great ongoing sort of a project. And like I said, Blender is a perfect example of seeing artists and developers kind of get together around the world and create something not for profit but to benefit humanity in a way, you could say, to benefit artists at least. Give them the right tools and make it just open, available for them to use. So that's where I would say that's the cool thing about Blender and and in many ways they've done things totally differently than Maya definitely their interface and all that stuff is different and that's sort of one thing i would say about ArtCraft is that maybe it's a cool thing that like let's say if you are right now in the Adobe ecosystem and you're used to using you know Photoshop or Premiere or whatever and you but you kind of just tired of paying the monthly subscription and having all those limitations of being tied to that subscription model well you can essentially now jump off and jump into this new software but you there is no learning curve or or you know not much of a learning curve because essentially it's the same thing right you know the menus you know where everything is you'll kind of be very familiar so that's sort of the good thing with it another good thing actually that i really like about ArtCraft is that it runs locally on your machine you can actually run it on a browser and remote but but but essentially if you install it it runs local on your machine you do not need to connect to anything and it just that makes it like I'll tell you that's one of the key reasons why I ditched Premiere you know suite of products years ago and kind of switched to using well DaVinci Resolve for both editing and compositing with their you know compositing node compositor that at the beginning I would say it was limited a lot more compared to After Effects but now I've gotten so used to it and and they've also added a lot of features that I feel like it's just you know the the it's just as good and maybe even better than After Effects in some ways but and like i said so so the cool thing is though that like just like with DaVinci Resolve is that ArtCraft you can install it it's local on your machine and i remember i had a project it was quite important project in South America and i was using adobe products and you know i was paying the whole license subscription and all that stuff but i happened to be in a remote location for almost two weeks and i could not basically what happened is after a few days the software asked me and said oh you need to verify your license again and to verify it i had to be connected online and i don't know how they do that now maybe they fixed that problem but i remember for the life of me i could not get that thing to work i was able to finally get on a phone with somebody from adobe but i could still could not get like an actual data you know internet connection and they basically said well we can't help you because you know you're not connected to internet and I was like so like what the hell am I paying for the software you know for so that that's one thing definitely also I wasn't a fan of paying an ongoing subscription every month but but that was the secondary reason and so not having a bit essentially I had software I paid for and I was not able to use it on a project because I was in a remote location like that really got to me and that's when I just decided I mean I cannot rely on the software anymore so it's going to be interesting to see what adobe does now with you know this kind of you know news coming out um are they can they even legally go after them let me know what you think and and if they do go after them are they really get able to stop this it's kind of like you know like what happened with like when music you know mp3s came out and stuff it's just i mean eventually it changed completely the music industry and the music industry had to adapt to the technology and i kind of think that's probably what's going to happen now, because what AI allows software developers, you know, independent software developers, engineers to create. So I would not be surprised if the whole industry changes. How is it going to change? Again, I don't know. You know, maybe some of you have an opinion, let me know. But I definitely don't know, don't know what to expect. But I can definitely tell you that it's an interesting new can of worms that's been opened with this whole thing. And is it good or bad? I mean, maybe it's neither, but you could say it's good in that sense. It gives you now ability to use it locally on your machine. Not only that, but for example, I've been switching and doing a lot of stuff on Linux, and you can run it now on Linux. So that's another cool thing. Or if you still want to use Mac or Windows, obviously you can do that. But that gives you more freedom. Yeah, it just has a lot of this this thing and now one thing i was thinking about it is is it going to be worse when let's say let's say if a company like Adobe were to completely go under because of these changes in the industry is that a good thing or bad thing i mean some way you could say well all these developers you know and engineers at Adobe that were working there i mean they created a lot of cool features right i mean you know there's a lot of cool features that whether it's Photoshop or After Effects have and so now does that mean that nobody because there's no you know no money to be made nobody's going to develop that technology further so you could say that but at the same time if you looked at you know even like Blender i mean it's there is no really financial motive and if the software is getting developed and new features are being added and some way better than even some of these big corporations have done so i don't know maybe maybe it won't stop innovation as necessarily you will just change the way things are run and and kind of you know more for the good of society or good for for us artists right in the industry um one other thing i do like about the you know the art craft is that for example because it's designed with AI it's right away designed with you know AI agents basically in mind so again i'm not necessarily a fan of AI being used in the creative industry you know to essentially just you know help people who have no creative ideas or vision to just create artwork which then essentially is you know a copy or you know or variation of all these different artwork that other artists have created I think if you're going to use AI whether you're using an image generator or video generation or audio or music generation or now you know using it you know to to drive your software I think you still have to have as an artist your own vision because otherwise that's how you end up with this you know AI slap where yeah it looks cool but it kind of looks very generic right so I would say if you want to have something really original something really good you as an artist have to have those original ideas original vision of how things are going to be and what they should look like and all that stuff but then that's when I do love using AI for example in DaVinci Resolve AI is great it speeds up rotoscoping and masking right it's you know speech recognition so you can you know for example do like text you know or subtitles really quickly so that's the really sort of the advantages of AI uh and for example in Blender i've actually started lately using AI agents to help me drive Blender not to again create or basically make creative decisions for me no i that's still my idea my decision and essentially what i'm using the AI agents is to i'm kind of training it showing it what i'm doing and letting it speed up my workflow so instead of me having to sit and do basically a technical task like i already know what i want to achieve and i know how to achieve it it's just would take me maybe a week or something you know to do this one task and because of that it costs me more money and it does not allow me to do a lot of these independent projects that i would want to do well now with ai i can essentially speed up my workflow and have an AI agent drive Blender and do a lot of these things or for problem solving like there's so many things you can do in a lot of the software like Blender and so to be an expert in every area I would say is almost impossible because you might be an expert in animation but you're not going to be an expert in particle systems like for example that's the case with me or vice versa or you might be an expert in doing cloth simulations but not in character animations and you know or rendering or building shaders and stuff so that's kind of what i find usually is when it comes to 3d artists is that we're all kind of specialized in one area but we know in general the whole software package but we're not experts in all of its features and there's many times i've run into or i've seen other people that i work with run into an issue where they're just trying to do something in blender that's just not their area of expertise and they know what they want to do they just don't know technically like where's that feature or or they come up with some kind of a bug and it's not letting them render properly or whatever and and that's where you can use an ai agent to essentially problem solve for you and figure it out and get you to figure out that issue so that that technical hurdle is out of the way so you as an artist can actually concentrate on the creative work and that's where i would say ai is is a group you know a great use uh basically scenario because again if you're using ai to make creative decisions now that's lame and essentially that's stealing i would say other people's work but if you're using it just to speed up your workflow make yourself more efficient i think in the future you know if you're just an artist but you don't know how to use ai you're going to be a behind a lot like because again the artists that have creative vision but also know how to use ai tools are just going to be able to produce the content and you know their work a lot quicker than people who don't know those tools so that's sort of the cool thing and so that's sort of neat about artcraft is that they've right away built it with ai agents in mind so you can actually use like JSON channels or you know any of these other ways that to basically essentially drive and drive the software using an you know AI robot and you know bot or agent whatever you want to call it and and essentially you know take control of your software so whether it's technical issues or whatever, problem solve something that you're stuck in, the AI agents can kind of kind of help you and speed up your workflow, essentially. So yeah, there's a lot of cool things. Interesting what's happening. I don't know what's going to happen. I mean, especially with these guys, are they going to get taken down? Now again, they're kind of, you could say, taking on Microsoft. I don't know. It's a whole new world. I guess we're going to see what comes out of it. And you know, I would say when it comes to any technology, right, even like nuclear technology, when it came out it can be used for bad and can be used for good so it's not necessarily that you can say technology is bad it's just that you know or good technology is just technology it's a tool it's what people do with it that you know makes it it can can be basically good or bad so you could say people can do good or bad things with the technology that we have so i guess we'll see what happens with this thing and where the next development is going to be but yeah if you guys to keep up with with this kind of stuff and are interested in these kind of topics or if you want to reach out to me maybe about something else uh that you're also hearing about then definitely head on over to my website at tomantosfilms.com and while you're there you know again maybe check out some of my other videos or leave me a comment that's it for this video i'll see you guys in the next one. Bye!