lightcraft/ROADMAP.md

LightCraft roadmap

Milestones toward full Adobe Lightroom parity (cloud Lightroom first, then every Lightroom Classic module), with wall-clock estimates for continuous (24/7) agent-driven development with 4–6 parallel agents. Estimates are calibrated on the sibling projects (DrawCraft reached its first four milestones in ≈ 4½ h) and are revised as milestones land.

Status legend: ✅ done · 🚧 in progress · ⬜ not started

#	Milestone	Scope (summary)	Estimate (h)	Status
M0	Skeleton + visual shell	workspace, xtask CI + layering, geom/color/raster, develop model, pipeline v0, catalog v0, engine commands, Lightroom-look UI (grid, loupe, filmstrip, Edit panel), control channel, MCP, web build	3–5	✅
M1	Library core	import (JPEG/PNG/TIFF/WebP), EXIF/XMP, persistent catalog (op log + snapshots), albums, ratings/flags/labels, filter/search/sort, thumbnail cache, 100k-photo grid	6–10	✅ (100k-photo grid scale test pending)
M2	Pipeline v1 (quality)	WB temp/tint, profiles, local tone mapping (highlights/shadows), curves, HSL, point colour, colour grading, texture/clarity/dehaze, vignette, grain, B&W, auto tone/WB, histogram, before/after	10–15	✅ (look tuning vs our references ongoing)
M3	RAW I	TIFF/DNG (LJ92, deflate, tiles, opcodes), demosaic (AHD/PPG/bilinear), highlight recovery, DNG colour model, CR2, NEF, ARW, embedded previews	10–15	🚧 (DNG, CR2, ARW, NEF uncompressed, embedded previews ✅; NEF Huffman ⬜)
M4	Crop, geometry, optics	crop tool + overlays, straighten, Upright (auto/level/vertical/full/guided), manual transforms, CA, defringe, manual lens corrections	6–10	✅
M5	Performance	source pyramids, wgpu compute pipeline (CPU oracle), draft/full renders, prefetch, budgets (16 ms slider updates on 24 MP)	10–15	🚧 (stage cache, source pyramid, wgpu pipeline, prefetch, memory budget ✅; colour NR at half resolution, GPU histogram ⬜)
M6	Masking	brush, linear/radial gradients, colour/luminance/depth range, add/subtract/intersect/invert, all local adjustments, masks panel	8–12	🚧 (brush/linear/radial/colour/luminance range, add/subtract/intersect, masks panel ✅; depth range, AI masks ⬜)
M7	Detail	sharpening + masking preview, luminance/colour NR, Denoise, Raw Details, Super Resolution	6–10	🚧 (sharpening, luminance/colour NR ✅; AI Denoise, Raw Details, Super Resolution ⬜)
M8	Heal / Remove	content-aware remove (PatchMatch), heal, clone, brush spots, visualize spots, red/pet eye	6–10	🚧 (heal, clone, auto source, visualize spots, red/pet eye ✅; PatchMatch remove ⬜)
M9	Presets, profiles, versions, sync	preset browser + amount, create/import presets, profile browser, versions, history, copy/paste/sync settings	5–8	✅
M10	Export & share	export dialog (JPEG/PNG/TIFF/DNG/AVIF/JXL/original), sizing, sharpening, metadata, watermark, naming, batch jobs, XMP sidecars, HDR export	6–10	🚧 (all formats incl. DNG/original, sizing, presets, background jobs ✅; JXL encode, HDR export ⬜)
M11	RAW II	CR3, RAF (X-Trans), ORF, RW2, PEF, SRW, 3FR, IIQ + long tail; camera calibration DB; HEIC/AVIF/JXL import	20–35	🚧 (RAF uncompressed, RW2 packed, PEF, ORF uncompressed ✅; CR3, compressed NEF/ORF/RAF ⬜)
M12	AI & smart features	subject/sky/background/people/object masks, semantic search, faces/People (permissively licensed models, pure-Rust inference)	20–40	⬜
M13	Merge	HDR merge (deghost), panorama (projections, boundary warp, fill edges), HDR panorama	10–15	✅
M14	Video	import/playback/trim via FilmCraft crates, global edits + presets on video, video export	6–10	⬜
M15	Classic modules	Map, Book, Slideshow, Print, Web; smart collections, stacks, virtual copies, publish services, tethering	25–40	🚧 (smart albums, stacks, virtual copies, compare/survey ✅; Map/Book/Slideshow/Print/Web ⬜)
M16	1.0 polish	preferences, shortcut editor, accessibility, localization, packaging (dmg/msi/AppImage/web), hardening	10–20	🚧 (settings, keyboard shortcuts sheet, packaging basics ✅; accessibility, localisation ⬜)

Parity estimate (2026-10-02, evening update)

By feature count — from docs/parity.md (one row per Lightroom feature, menu item and shortcut; cargo xtask parity prints this line on every run, so it stays current):

Scope	Weighted completion	Rows	Morning
P0 (core)	98.7%	198	98.5%
P1 (important parity)	94.4%	144	79.9%
P2 (later / AI / niche, incl. Classic modules)	29.4%	158	11.7%
All in-scope rows	75.6%	500	65.7%

✅ counts 1, 🟡 ½, ⬜ 0; out-of-scope rows (cloud sharing, Adobe accounts…) are left out.

By remaining effort — rows are not equal: a shortcut and the whole Book module are one row each, and what is left is the heavy part (AI, video, Classic output modules, undocumented raw codecs). Remaining work in Opus agent-hours (one agent working continuously; calibrated on this project — a single lead agent closed ≈ 45 tracker rows of UI/feature work in ≈ 5 h on 2026-10-01, and ≈ 60 more (preset import incl. .lrtemplate / DNG / zip and masks, smart-album rule editor, auto sync, keyword and label sets, import options and DNG conversion, smart previews, external-editor round trip, slideshow, auto import…) in ≈ 12 h on 2026-10-02; four to six parallel agents built M0–M13 in ≈ 25 active hours):

Work package	Tracker rows	Agent-hours	Risk
Remaining P0/P1 UI and library features (folder rename/move, keyword painter, people view…)	≈ 8	5–10	low
Raw codecs: CR3 (CRX), compressed NEF / ORF / RAF, RW2 v4, HEIC/AVIF decode, JPEG XL DNG	LR-IMP-FORMATS	40–80	high — clean-room black-box analysis, no permissive specs
Lens-profile database of our own (calibration targets, fitting, data)	LR-EDIT-OPTICS-PROFILE	15–30	data collection
Video: playback, trim, edits, export (pure-Rust decode, ideally shared with FilmCraft)	R. Video	20–40	medium
AI: subject / sky / background / people / object masks, object-aware remove, AI denoise, super resolution, lens blur, people & faces, natural-language search, culling	≈ 30	80–150	high — permissively licensed weights, pure-Rust inference, maybe training
HDR editing, display, visualisation and export	Q. HDR, LR-EXP-HDR	15–25	medium
Classic modules: Map, Book, Slideshow module, Print, publish services, tethering, soft proofing	≈ 50	60–100	medium (large, well-understood)
Smaller P2 items: Enhance dialog, export to Photos, help / what's new, accessibility, localisation, sidecar variants	≈ 15	12–25	low
Look tuning, performance budgets (colour NR at half resolution on CPU + GPU, 100k-photo library), packaging, hardening	—	25–45	medium
Total remaining		≈ 270–505

Spent so far ≈ 105–145 agent-hours, so by effort the project is ≈ 20–35% of the way to complete Lightroom + Classic parity, and ≈ 45–60% of the way for cloud-Lightroom parity without AI and the Classic modules (remaining ≈ 130–255 h, most of it the raw codecs, lens data, video and HDR).

Wall clock: ≈ 270–505 h for one agent working alone; with 4–6 parallel agents (≈ 70% parallel efficiency, merges and CI under load cost the rest) ≈ 65–125 h of continuous work. The AI package and the raw codecs carry most of the uncertainty: they can finish faster if suitable permissive models / documentation turn up, or stall on licensing.

Totals

Remaining from 2026-10-02 evening (see Parity estimate above for the breakdown):

Target	Remaining agent-hours	Wall clock, 4–6 parallel agents
Cloud-Lightroom parity without AI or Classic modules	≈ 130–255 h	≈ 35–65 h
Full parity incl. AI, video and the Classic modules	≈ 270–505 h	≈ 65–125 h

The milestone estimates in the table above were made before work started and are kept for calibration (M0–M13 took ≈ 25 active hours with parallel agents against an estimate of ≈ 110–170 h for those milestones).

Risks that coding hours alone don't retire

• AI features (subject/sky/people masks, generative remove) need model weights with licences we can ship; classical fallbacks first. No permissively licensed sky-segmentation or raw-denoise model was found — we may need to train our own.
• Camera colour and lens data is a data problem: we never use Adobe's matrices, DCPs or LCPs. DNG-embedded data first, then our own calibration; long-tail camera/lens coverage grows over time.
• Legal decisions pending: whether GPL-licensed prose format descriptions (e.g. the public CR3 write-up) may be read by a designated engineer to produce an internal spec; freedom-to-operate review for local Laplacian filters, PatchMatch and HEVC (HEIC).
• Look parity with Adobe's default rendering is subjective tuning against our own reference targets.

Raw format coverage and known gaps

Decoded (CC0 corpus from raw.pixls.us, cargo xtask corpus --download, crates/raw/tests/corpus.rs): DNG (uncompressed, LJ92, lossy JPEG / Smart Previews, Deflate, float, linear), CR2, ARW (uncompressed, ARW2, LJ92), NEF/NRW uncompressed, RAF uncompressed (Bayer and X-Trans), RW2 packed 12/14-bit, PEF (uncompressed and Huffman), ORF uncompressed (16-bit and 12-bit packed). Every supported container also yields its embedded JPEG preview (CR3 too), and the engine shows that preview for raw variants it can't decode yet.

Not decoded yet — preview only (no permissively licensed description; black-box analysis incomplete):

• Nikon Huffman NEF (lossless / lossy). Black-box findings so far: maker note 0x0096 holds per-parity predictor seeds (2048 for 14-bit lossless); ≈ 9 bits per pixel; the category-0 code word is a 6-bit rotation of 011111. The Huffman tables are not stored in the files, and an automatic table search (beam search over prefix codes scored by smoothness and bit rate, validated on Pentax files whose tables are stored) did not converge.
• Panasonic RW2 raw format 4 (quantised): the block layout is known (0x4000-byte chunks rotated by 0x1ff8; 128-bit blocks of two 12-bit seeds plus four groups of a 2-bit scale and three 8-bit codes; scales 0/1 are ×1/×2 differences from the same-colour pixel two to the left), the reconstruction rule for scales 2/3 is not established.
• Olympus compressed ORF, Fujifilm compressed RAF, Canon CR3/CRX (M11.1), Canon sRAW/mRAW, lossy DNG.

Camera colour matrices: non-DNG raws use the documented neutral fallback (camera RGB ≈ linear sRGB, flagged matrix_is_fallback) with the file's as-shot white-balance multipliers. Clean sources to evaluate next: manufacturer matrices stored in the files themselves (Olympus ImageProcessing ColorMatrix, Pentax/Panasonic equivalents) and our own chart-based calibration (M11.4). Adobe matrices are never used.

Log

• 2026-09-30: roadmap created; M0 in progress; research docs (Lightroom reference, Rust imaging ecosystem) complete.
• 2026-09-30 (later): app running with the full Lightroom-style UI; pipeline v0; DNG/CR2/ARW; README showcase. ≈ 8 h elapsed.
• 2026-10-02: parity estimate added (xtask parity prints weighted completion); milestone statuses refreshed.
• 2026-10-01: RAW II formats: RAF (uncompressed Bayer + X-Trans), RW2 (packed), PEF (incl. Huffman), ORF (uncompressed); embedded previews for every container incl. CR3; raw corpus test with 37 CC0 samples.