photocraft/docs/roadmap.md

Roadmap

Status legend: ✅ done · 🟡 in progress · ⬜ not started. Updated 2026-10-05.

Parity metrics. cargo xtask parity measures how much of Photoshop's menu tree is wired to a command and writes parity.md. It does not measure whether those commands behave like Photoshop, feel right, or survive real files. Read it next to the PSD composite oracle, the test count, and the honest parity assessment below, which is the reference answer to "how close are we really". The weighted feature estimate in parity-estimate.md (~82%) counts feature surface and overstates user-facing readiness; treat it as an upper bound.

M	Status	Where we are
M0 Skeleton	✅	workspace, xtask (layers / wasm / ci / stats / corpus / parity), CI workflow
M1 Foundation	✅	geom, color (27 blend modes), raster (COW tiles, any depth), doc, ops, cms (ICC)
M2 PSD v1	✅	photocraft-psd: 134/135 real files byte-exact round trip
M3 Viewer app	✅	egui shell (Pro / Studio / Classic themes), 13+ codecs, native and web (trunk) builds
M4 Native format + engine	✅	500+ commands, .pcraft (incremental, autosave, crash recovery), CLI, persistent preferences
M5 GPU compositor	🟡	wgpu compositor drives the canvas, layer effects, vector masks, artboards, pattern fills and every clip case included (≤1/255 vs CPU); Multichannel documents fall back to the CPU
M6 Paint + select	🟡	brush engine, all selection tools, multi-layer selection, snapping + smart guides, free transform + warp; stylus pressure on Windows (WM_POINTER via winit) and the web (Pointer Events, with tilt/twist); macOS and Linux wait on winit tablet support
M7 Adjust + filters	🟡	16 adjustment layers + destructive-only adjustments, 70+ filters incl. Blur Gallery, Actions record/replay, Fade
M8 PSD v2	🟡	adjustments (incl. Selective Color, Color Lookup), fills, effects, patterns, text, shapes, smart objects, alpha channels; oracle 111/170
M9 Text, vector, styles	🟡	type engine + Warp Text, shapes / pen / paths, all 10 effects on CPU and GPU (parity ≤1/255, 30/31 corpus effect files on the GPU)
M10 Smart features	🟡	classical Select Subject / Object, content-aware fill and scale, healing, auto-align / auto-blend; ML backend not started
M11 Automation + formats	🟡	MCP (headless + live bridge), batch, Image Processor, prefs over MCP; DoD test passes (10 agent tasks over MCP, automation/tests/agent_tasks.rs); JP2 / DICOM / DPX / C2PA pending
M12 Pro parity	🟡	CMYK / Lab / Indexed / Bitmap / Duotone, ICC + soft proofing, channels + Quick Mask, smart-object stack modes, artboards, layer comps; print, HDR, photomerge, timeline pending

Menu parity: 532 / 625 (85.1%) on 2026-10-01, up from 224 (35.8%) the day before. See parity.md.

Honest parity assessment (2026-10-05)

Written after the 0.2.0 release and the first wave of real user feedback. We are far from real Photoshop parity. parity.md says 625/625 menu items are live, but that only means each item dispatches a command. In the first day of public use, users hit broken basics that all counted as "live": text selection offset from the cursor, shortcuts that didn't fire after clicking a panel (214 failures in an audit), panels resizing themselves, an immovable crop frame, folders that wouldn't collapse, and lag on layout-style PSDs.

Area	State
Core editing (layers, masks, selections, adjustments, filters, transforms, blend modes)	Broad coverage; engine quality decent; interaction/UI quality only started catching up after 0.2.0.
PSD fidelity	Composite oracle 113/170 (~66%). All adjustment layers and blend modes round-trip; Photoshop smart filters in PSDs, some effect shapes and text-engine details remain. psd-tools corpus being added (#81).
Tools	~20 Photoshop tools missing entirely: Pencil, Mixer Brush (as a tool), Patch, Content-Aware Move, Red Eye, Pattern Stamp, Art History Brush, Freeform/Curvature Pen, anchor tools, Direct Selection, Magnetic Lasso, single row/column marquee, Color Sampler, Perspective Crop, Rotate View, vertical type and type masks, Frame.
Text	Engine works; advanced typography (OpenType features, text-on-path editing, full paragraph composer parity) and PSD text fidelity are partial.
Painting	Brush model close to Photoshop after #136/#174; no pen pressure on macOS/Linux (#79), no Mixer Brush tool, no Art History Brush.
AI / generative	~0%: no Generative Fill/Expand (#41, deferred), Neural Filters or Remove tool. Classical Select Subject / Content-Aware Fill only.
Ecosystem	No .8BF plug-ins (by decision: sandboxed WebAssembly plug-ins instead), no ExtendScript/UXP/.atn actions, no Adobe Fonts / Libraries / cloud documents.
Camera RAW	DNG, CR2, Sony ARW (lossless + compressed), RW2, uncompressed ORF decode; Nikon compressed NEF, CR3, RAF fall back to the embedded preview (clean-room limits, #50).
Performance / robustness	Strong on large rasters (14k+ on the GPU, banded memory); layout-style documents were laggy (#125/#128 in progress); real-file testing has only just begun.

Estimate. Feature surface: roughly 55–70% of what a typical Photoshop user touches exists in some form. "A working professional could switch today": roughly 20–35%; professionals live in the details (exact tool behaviour, PSD fidelity on their own files, typography, AI, plug-ins). True 1:1 parity is many months of focused work, and some areas need product decisions rather than effort (generative AI backend, the 8BF ecosystem, clean-room RAW limits).

Making it measurable (replace guesses with numbers; update this section as they land):

1. Workflow acceptance tests: 30–50 real tasks (e.g. retouch a portrait, build a social post with text and effects, composite with masks and adjustment layers, prepare a CMYK print file), each scripted end to end and checked against Photoshop's output, run on every build. The pass rate becomes the headline parity number.
2. Real-file corpus: users' shareable PSDs plus the psd-tools set (#81), with pass-rate floors that only go up (crates/io/tests/corpus.rs).
3. Recurring visual QA: screenshot sweeps of realistic documents (cargo run -p photocraft-engine --example designer_psd). The first sweep found 14 defects (#147–#157) that unit tests missed.
4. User reports: fast turnaround from report → issue → fix; ask reporters for OS, document size, layer count and a screenshot.

Current focus (infrastructure before the long tail)

Landed on 2026-10-01:

• multi-layer selection, live smart objects + smart filters, alpha channels + Quick Mask;
• patterns, Warp, preferences, snapping, ~33 filters, the remaining core adjustments;
• Layer Comps and Artboards, GPU layer effects, Liquify / Puppet Warp / Perspective Warp;
• the PSD fidelity pass (oracle 102 → 111), the M11 MCP acceptance test, and the release pipeline (docs/releasing.md).

Next:

1. Quality of what exists (from user feedback after 0.2.0, see the assessment above): workflow acceptance tests, real-file corpus, visual QA, and the open user issues. 0.2.0 shipped signed and notarized on 2026-10-05 (docs/releasing.md); Windows code-signing material still needs to be obtained.
2. Fidelity: the PSD oracle (113/170). Modern Brightness/Contrast and grayscale Levels curves; chisel-soft / stroke-emboss bevel shapes; Photoshop's 8-bit blend rounding; non-Normal modes in Lab documents; Photoshop smart filters in SoLd.
3. GPU: only Multichannel documents and regions over the texture limit fall back to the CPU.
4. Vanishing Point, Camera Raw / Lens Correction, Face-Aware Liquify (needs a landmark model).
5. Panels: Patterns, Styles, Glyphs, Character/Paragraph Styles, Timeline; Custom Shape tool.
6. Print, Photomerge, Merge to HDR, video layers.

Milestone definitions

Each milestone has a definition of done (DoD) and must leave main green on all Tier-1 platforms plus a wasm build.

M	Name	Scope (key items)	DoD / acceptance
M0	Skeleton	Workspace, all crate stubs, lints, xtask (layers check, ci), CI matrix, testkit	cargo test --workspace green; cargo check --target wasm32-unknown-unknown -p photocraft-engine -p photocraft-ui-egui green; layering check passes
M1	Foundation	geom, color (formats, blend math for all 27 modes, sRGB/linear), raster (sparse COW tiles, U8/U16/F32), doc (full type model incl. CMYK/Lab/adjust/smart), ops (history)	Property tests (proptest) on tile COW and history; blend-mode reference tests against published formulas
M2	PSD v1	photocraft-psd: header, resources, layer records, channel data (raw/RLE/ZIP/ZIP+pred), masks, groups (lsct), unicode names, unknown-block passthrough, merged image, PSB; writer	Round-trip byte-stability tests; synthetic PSD generator tests; fuzz target; ≥150 unit tests
M3	Viewer app	codecs (png/jpeg/tiff/webp/gif/bmp/tga/pnm/qoi/exr/hdr, all read+write), CPU compositor, egui shell (menu from registry, canvas pan/zoom, layers panel, history), open/save, native + web build	Opens PNG/JPEG/PSD, shows layers, toggles visibility, undo/redo, saves PNG/PSD; web build loads a file from the browser
M4	Native format + engine	.pcraft bundle, command registry with schemas, jobs/cancellation, snapshots via arc-swap, CLI (convert, run, inspect)	CLI parity tests: every GUI command also runs headless
M5	GPU compositor	wgpu planner backend, tile residency, parity tests vs CPU (all blend modes), viewport on GPU, mips	GPU vs CPU ≤1/255; pan/zoom 60 fps on a 100 MP / 20-layer document
M6	Paint + select	platform input (pen: macOS/Windows/Linux/web), brush engine v1, eraser, marquee/lasso/wand, move, free transform, crop	Brush latency <1 frame; selection-restricted paint tests
M7	Adjust + filters	16 adjustment layers, first 30 filters, schema-generated dialogs + live preview, actions record/replay	Golden tests at 8/16/32f; action replay determinism
M8	PSD v2	adjustment layers, fill layers, lfx2 effects (descriptor parser), text (EngineData) preserve+render, smart objects, vector masks	Composite-oracle pass rate ≥90% on corpus
M9	Text, vector, styles	parley text layers, shapes/pen/paths, all 10 layer effects on GPU	Visual goldens; PSD text round-trip
M10	Smart features	ml (ort native / ort-web on the web), Select Subject/Object/Sky, Remove BG, Remove tool, content-aware fill, healing, AI denoise, RAW develop	Quality benchmarks on a public dataset; timing budgets
M11	Automation + formats	MCP server, batch, scripting, remaining formats (JP2, DICOM, DPX…), C2PA	An agent completes 10 scripted edit tasks via MCP
M12	Pro parity	CMYK/Lab UI, print, HDR display, photomerge/HDR merge, timeline, layer comps, artboards, symmetry, neural filters	xtask parity ≥ 90% of Photoshop menu checklist