A GPU-accelerated image editor built for Linux and Wayland.
Rust and Qt 6 QML. Zero-copy wgpu/Vulkan canvas. A dense, Photoshop-shaped
workspace drawn in the idiom of KDE Plasma 6.
Website · Documentation · Changelog · Contributing
Status: early, and honest about it. PhotoTux is at version 0.1.0 and has never been tagged as a release. The editor opens, paints, composites, saves and reopens documents, and it is used daily by its author — but it has not been through a public beta, the
.ptxformat still moves between versions, and there are corners that have only ever been driven by one pair of hands. Keep backups of anything you care about.
Linux has capable image editors. What it does not have much of is an editor
that treats frame time as a feature. PhotoTux composites entirely on the
GPU and never moves pixel buffers across the Rust↔Qt boundary during
interaction — the canvas texture is written by wgpu and presented by Qt's
Vulkan RHI on the same device, so a 4K document with a stack of layers scrolls
at the refresh rate of the monitor rather than the speed of a memcpy.
The second half is the shell. Panels, tools and menus sit where Adobe Photoshop puts them, so muscle memory carries over, and every pixel of chrome is drawn from a single token file that follows KDE Plasma 6's spacing, shapes and focus treatment. Photoshop decides where; Plasma decides how it looks.
Canvas and compositing
- Zero-copy GPU compositing on
wgpu/Vulkan — no CPU pixel upload in the steady-state view path - 28 blend modes, grouped the way the Photoshop menu groups them, including the non-separable Hue / Saturation / Color / Luminosity set
- Zoom ladder that passes through 100% exactly, pointer-anchored wheel zoom, fit-on-screen, Navigator panel
Layers
- Raster, group, text, shape, fill, adjustment and smart-object layers
- Per-layer opacity, blend mode, clipping, locks and Blend If ranges
- Layer masks with mask ⇄ selection round-trips
- Duplicate, Merge Down, Merge Visible, Flatten Image, Group / Ungroup, Align and Distribute
- Eight layer styles: Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer Glow, Inner Glow, Stroke, Color Overlay, Gradient Overlay, Bevel
Non-destructive editing
- Smart objects — a transform re-applies to the pristine source instead of accumulating on the pixels
- Adjustment layers: Brightness/Contrast, Levels, Hue/Saturation, Invert, Threshold, Posterize, Exposure, Vibrance, Black & White, White Balance
- A filter plan per layer with 13 effects: Gaussian Blur, Box Blur, Motion Blur, Zoom Blur, Sharpen, Unsharp Mask, High Pass, Clarity, Denoise, Emboss, Add Noise, Offset, Invert
- A filter gallery that previews without touching the document until you commit
Tools
- Move, Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee, Lasso, Polygonal Lasso, Magic Wand, Color Range, Crop, Free Transform, Eyedropper
- Brush, Clone Stamp, Eraser, Gradient, Paint Bucket
- Blur, Sharpen, Smudge, Dodge, Burn, Sponge
- Pen / Path Edit, Text, Shape, Hand, Zoom
Selections
- Rectangular, elliptical, freehand, polygonal, by colour
- Add / subtract / intersect combination, Select All, Deselect, Inverse
- Modify ▸ Expand, Contract, Feather, Border and Smooth, each asking for its radius rather than guessing
Files
.ptx— the native layered document, a chunked container with per-layer rasters, masks and smart-object sources- Layered PSD import and export, with a compatibility report naming anything the subset could not carry
- PNG, JPEG, WebP, TIFF, BMP and GIF import and export
- ICC profile embedding, assignment, conversion and soft-proofing
- Crash recovery for documents open when a session ends badly
Workspace
- Dockable panels: Layers, Properties, History, Navigator, Adjustments, Channels, Paths, Brushes, Swatches, Info
- Workspace presets, a command palette, and rebindable shortcuts with conflict detection
- Document tabs
Every command in the editor also exists as an entry in the command palette
(Ctrl+Shift+P) and as a rebindable action.
More, with context, in the user guide.
| OS | Linux. Wayland is the target session; X11 works but is not what the frame budgets are measured against. |
| GPU | A working Vulkan driver. Mesa (radv, anv, nvk), AMDVLK or the proprietary NVIDIA driver all qualify. |
| Qt | 6.10 or newer, with qtdeclarative and qtsvg. |
| Rust | 1.87 or newer, edition 2024, if you are building from source. |
PhotoTux is a desktop GUI application. There is no CLI or TUI product, and Windows and macOS are out of scope for v1.
There are no distribution packages yet — building from source is the way in.
git clone https://github.com/PerkyZZ999/Phototux.git
cd Phototux
export PATH=/usr/lib/qt6/bin:$PATH
export QMAKE=/usr/lib/qt6/bin/qmake
cargo run --release -p phototuxThe PATH and QMAKE exports matter on any distribution that ships Qt 5's
qmake first — the build links against whichever Qt qmake reports, and Qt 5
is not it. Arch Linux dependencies:
sudo pacman -S --needed rust qt6-base qt6-declarative qt6-svg vulkan-icd-loader cmakeFirst launch opens New Document with 720p / 1080p / 2K / 4K presets. Full instructions, including other distributions and troubleshooting, are in the installation guide.
| Audience | Where |
|---|---|
| Users — guides, tools, shortcuts, troubleshooting | docs.phototux.xyz |
| Contributors — architecture, subsystem contracts, decisions | internal_docs/ |
| Contributors — workflow, quality gate, crate map | 32 — Developer Guide |
| Contributors — why things are the way they are | Decision Register |
| Agents — coding constitution | AGENTS.md |
The Engineering Handbook in internal_docs/ is the
authoritative description of the system. The public documentation site is
generated from a separate source tree in web/docs/ and is
written for people using the editor rather than building it.
Bug reports, patches and QML polish are all welcome. Start with
CONTRIBUTING.md — it covers the workspace layout, the
quality gate (rust-tc quick before a push, rust-tc doctor before anything
substantial), and the conventions the codebase holds to.
Security issues go to SECURITY.md rather than the public tracker. Everyone taking part is expected to follow the Code of Conduct.
PhotoTux is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.
Icons are Phosphor Icons, MIT licensed.
- Charles W. (PerkyZZ999) — author and maintainer
- Claude/Cursor — AI pair programming