Image to ASCII Art

What this tool does

Image to ASCII Art turns any picture into text made of characters. Tune the width, character ramp and tone, then copy the text, or download it as TXT, coloured HTML or a PNG image.

ASCII art represents an image using characters whose visual density matches the brightness of each area: a space for empty regions, dots and dashes for light tones and characters like # and @ for heavy ones. It works anywhere plain text does, from code comments and README files to terminals, chat messages and email signatures.

This converter resizes the image to one cell per character, computes each cell's luminance with the Rec. 709 weights (0.2126 R + 0.7152 G + 0.0722 B), applies your brightness, contrast and gamma, and maps the result onto a character ramp. Because monospaced characters are about twice as tall as they are wide, the vertical sampling is corrected so the picture is not stretched. Optional Floyd-Steinberg dithering diffuses rounding errors to neighbouring characters, and colour mode keeps each pixel's colour for HTML and PNG output.

How to use Image to ASCII Art

1. Drop or paste an image, or press Try a sample image.
2. Set Width in characters: 60-80 fits a chat message or code comment, 150 or more gives fine detail.
3. Choose a Character set, or Custom and type your own characters, lightest ink first.
4. Adjust Brightness, Contrast and Gamma, and try Dithering or Invert.
5. Under Display choose Dark background or Light background to match where the text will appear.
6. Copy the text, or download TXT, HTML (with colour) or PNG.

Tips for better results

• High-contrast subjects such as logos, silhouettes and portraits against plain backgrounds give the most recognisable results.
• Raise Contrast by 20-40 for photos; ASCII has few tone levels, so midtones otherwise turn muddy.
• If the result looks squashed or stretched in your editor, adjust Character aspect correction; 0.5 suits most monospaced fonts.
• The Unicode blocks set gives smooth shading but needs a font that includes block elements.

Common use cases

• Adding a logo banner to a README, a CLI tool start-up message or source code comments.
• Creating retro-style art for forums, chat channels and email signatures.
• Making posters and prints with coloured character art.
• Teaching how brightness, quantisation and dithering work using a visual example.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Pasting into a proportional font such as Arial; ASCII art only lines up in monospaced fonts.
• Choosing the wrong display mode: art made for a dark terminal looks like a negative on a white page.
• Using a width wider than the destination allows, so lines wrap and the picture breaks apart.