Files
photocraft/docs/ora.md
T
7722172585 Add OpenRaster (.ora) import and export (#2257)
Open and save .ora with pixel layers (any offset), nested groups, pass-through
groups, names, visibility, opacity, edit/alpha locks and blend modes (svg:* plus
Krita's krita:* names), at 8 and 16 bit. Save applies pixel masks, renders
text/shape/fill/smart layers to pixels and reports what OpenRaster can't hold.
Wired into File > Open/Save, the CLI, automation/MCP, the web picker and the
desktop file associations. Checked against 34 Krita 5.2.9-authored files
(opt-in krita_corpus test) and Krita re-opening our exports.

Co-authored-by: Scott Campbell <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Brandon Thomas <[email protected]>
2026-10-10 08:40:35 -04:00

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OpenRaster documents

PhotoCraft opens and saves OpenRaster (.ora), the layered format Krita, MyPaint, GIMP, Pinta and others share. File › Open, recent files, drops, Save and Save As, the CLI (convert, info, batch) and automation (doc.open, doc.save, MCP) all use the same reader and writer in photocraft-io. The browser build accepts .ora too. A file is recognised by its mimetype entry, so an OpenRaster file with another extension still opens as one.

What is kept

Open Save
Pixel layers (any size and position, also off-canvas) yes yes, cropped to their pixels
Groups, nested yes yes
Pass-through groups isolation="auto" without a blend mode isolation="auto"
Names, visibility, opacity yes yes
Blend modes the svg:* names, svg:plus, and Krita's krita:* names svg:* where the spec has the mode, else krita:* (read back by Krita, Normal elsewhere)
Locks edit-locked, alpha-preserve the same
8 and 16-bit yes (the deepest layer sets the depth) 8-bit documents as 8-bit PNGs, 16 and 32-bit as 16-bit PNGs
Resolution xres xres and yres
Merged image and thumbnail not read (we render our own) written (mergedimage.png, Thumbnails/thumbnail.png)

Saving reports what OpenRaster can't hold, layer by layer: pixel masks are applied to the layer's pixels, fill opacity is folded into the pixels, text, shape, fill and smart object layers are written as their rendered pixels, and adjustment layers, layer styles, vector masks, clipping, alpha channels, metadata and the colour profile are left out. Xor and Paint.NET's Color Burn and Color Dodge variants have no OpenRaster name and are saved as Normal. CMYK, Lab and other modes are refused with a message to convert first; Grayscale saves as RGB.

OpenRaster elements other than stack and layer (MyPaint's text, for example), missing layer images and unknown composite operations open with a warning instead of failing the file. Krita's W3C Soft Light (svg:soft-light, krita:soft_light_svg) and its own Hard Mix open as Photoshop's Soft Light and Hard Mix, which differ slightly, also with a warning.

Limits and safety

The reader takes the archive with the bounded ZIP reader of photocraft-format (no ZIP64, CRC-checked), parses stack.xml with roxmltree (16 MiB cap), and decodes each layer image through photocraft-codecs with size limits. Canvases are at most 300,000 px a side, at most 8,192 layers and groups, nesting at most MAX_GROUP_DEPTH deep, and 1 GiB of decoded pixels in total. Malformed archives, XML, numbers and images return errors; truncated and corrupted files are covered by tests.

Verification

Unit tests (crates/io/src/ora/tests.rs) round-trip layers, groups, pass-through, offsets, opacity, visibility, locks and every blend mode at 8 and 16 bit, check masks, rendered layer kinds, the archive layout and malformed input. crates/automation/tests/openraster.rs saves, reopens, edits and saves in place through the agent surface; the CLI test converts both ways.

Real-file checks use Krita-authored oracles from photocraft-corpus (krita/, made by tools/krita-oracles/generate.py). Each Krita file carries Krita's rendering of itself in mergedimage.png:

KRITA_TEST_DIR=/path/to/photocraft-corpus/krita cargo test -p photocraft-io --test krita_corpus -- --ignored --nocapture

2026-10-09, Krita 5.2.9: 30 of 34 .ora files render within 3/255 of Krita's merged image; the other four differ for known reasons listed in crates/io/tests/krita_corpus.rs (Krita's tie-break in Darker and Lighter Color, Hard Mix at a channel sum of exactly 1, and a linear-light 16-bit document that Krita blends in linear light). In the other direction, Krita opened every PhotoCraft re-export of those files and rendered 33 of them identically to its original; the exception is Photoshop's Soft Light, which is written as svg:soft-light. MyPaint and GIMP files have not been checked yet.

Format reference: the OpenRaster specification. The reader and writer are written from the specification and from files Krita writes; no application code was used.