I checked out LightCraft, their Lightroom clone, and I actually think this might just be a money grab, to funnel people into the subscription. While the UI’s are nearly identical, with the controls and their ranges replicated, the actual editing capabilities are really bad IMO. This is either a money-grab to get people pulled into the subscription ArtCraft offers, or just really vibecoded without any care for actual editing quality.
Simple edit using the Light controls, with the “same” image profile, white balance, etc. across both apps.
If you don’t care about ensuring the output, it is very easy to create all sorts of things, very fast and impressive-looking.
For for testing purposes, I tried getting to a roughly similar starting point with darktable 5.4.0. For this test, I wasn’t worried about which controls I touched. I was just seeing how hard it was to reach a similar balance of saturation, contrast, sharpening:
I also attempted the same thing: getting a similar level of saturation, contrast, and sharpening in LightCraft:
Obviously I am very familiar with editing photos in darktable (and previously used Lightroom extensively). In my opinion, Lighcraft is not at all similar to either. Because of this, it was quite challenging to figure out how to get to a similar level of edit with LightCraft. The primary challenge I found was how to get enough contrast in the image while trying to mitigate the clipped highlights.
Here is Lightroom beside RapidRAW (a slightly old version):
I’ll say this: RapidRAW is much more similar to Lightroom in how well the various controls work. I was able to start with the same control values as in lightroom and then just adjust from their a little. My attempt in LightCraft took a lot longer and many control changes felt very bad in comparison. It feels like RapidRAW went through a lot more QA than LightCraft.
Summary
LightCraft is definitely not an actual clone of Lightroom. Many of the interface elements are similar, but the controls are actually significantly different in how they work or don’t actually exist as they are presented. For example, the tone curve only allows the movement of preset points in the curve, rather than Lightroom’s/Darktable’s/RapidRAW’s free-form curve.
LightCraft feels very much vibe-coded, and seems to lack QA in my opinion (I could be wrong, and I apologize to the person behind it if I am mischaracterizing them). I think other projects, even if they are “vibe-coded” technically, have a better chance if they are actually true passion-projects.