brushpenbob/protoart-studio

Protoart Studio

A free, local AI image studio for Apple Silicon Macs. Everything runs on your Mac: no account, no cloud, no telemetry. It works on 8 GB Macs.

This repository holds the Mac installer (.dmg) and its checksum. It is not a model. The app's source code, full feature list and release notes are on GitHub:

• Download and release notes: https://github.com/theprotoart/protoart-studio/releases/latest
• Source code: https://github.com/theprotoart/protoart-studio
• Discord (help, news, ideas): https://discord.gg/zRC6zrufYE

What it does

• Create: text to image with FLUX.2 Klein, Z-Image, Qwen-Image 2.1, Krea 2 (bigger Macs), FLUX.1, SDXL (incl. Pony / Illustrious / NoobAI), SD 1.5, ERNIE-Image and more, with LoRAs, embeddings, ControlNet (pose, drawing, outlines, depth) with a pose library, poses for FLUX.2 Klein and ERNIE, regional prompts, 🎞 film looks, example prompts, a queue and live preview
• Image to image: ✨ edit with words, 🧩 combine a character into a scene, 📷 change the camera angle, character turnarounds, expression sheets and development boards, 🧅 peel layers into a layered .psd, inpaint, expand, ControlNet
• Tools: enhance & upscale, restore faces, replace text, a skin texture brush, Camera Raw-style adjustments, cut out backgrounds (BiRefNet or rembg finders), remove objects, vectorize, depth maps
• Relight & 3D: 💡 relight a picture with IC-Light, 🧊 turn a picture into a 3D model (.glb / .obj) with Hunyuan3D 2 mini
• Train: build a captioned training set from one character picture, your own LoRAs and embeddings, keep training a LoRA you made, and continue a stopped training
• Uses the models you already have from DiffusionBee, ComfyUI, A1111 / Forge, InvokeAI and Stability Matrix, where they are

Requirements

• Apple Silicon Mac (M1, M2, M3, M4 or newer); Intel Macs are not supported
• macOS 13 Ventura or newer
• 8 GB of memory works; 16 GB+ is comfortable
• Models, LoRAs and pictures can live on an external drive (Settings → Downloaded models folder, Image folder, Model files)
• About 2 GB for the app, plus 2–13 GB for each model you download

Install

1. Download Protoart-Studio-1.6.13.dmg (and, optionally, Protoart-Studio-1.6.13.dmg.sha256).
2. Optional check: in Terminal run shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/Protoart-Studio-1.6.13.dmg. It must print 626d27d5de3d970aadf0c238662de44f31b8ed0d09614e88e66674346408efbe.
3. Open the DMG and drag Protoart Studio onto Applications.
4. First launch: the app isn't notarised by Apple, so macOS blocks it the first time. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway (macOS 15+), or right-click the app → Open (older macOS).

Licences

The app's own code is open source under the Apache License 2.0. Models are not included: you download them inside the app, and each model keeps its own licence (some are non-commercial). Bundled software and its licences are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.