About ascii art maker

Of course, now we use Unicode (rather than good old ASCII) quite commonly in browsers, so characters from many languages can now be used. Click the "Change Text" button to try a few!

What makes this color ascii art look so legitimate?

Other leading ascii generators will make you choose between color output and proper ascii. In one case, the color output was simply "######" colorized to match the picture. That's a cop out! It's better to generate a monochrome ascii picture and colorize it. The problem with using the colors from the picture to do that, is that the lighter colors will make the ascii hard to see, and the brightness of each part of the picture is accounted for twice resulting in a washed-out image. Instead, this ascii art generator keeps only the hue and saturation of the colors, letting brightness or darkness come from the ascii characters themselves.

This technique is demonstrated above, where the brighter side of the tree trunk shown retains its rich dark brown color, even in the lighter shaded areas. Only the characters chosen express the brightness of the color.

Why is there a sharpness control?

Why shouldn't there be? It has to do with the fact that, while most ascii art generators only look at the shade of each part of the picture, this one tries to match the shape too.

For each character a decision has to be made whether to use the character that best fits the shade of that part of the picture, or to match the shape. It already selects the best shape from the top few matching shades, but the control gives you a say in which way it leans.

Larger ascii art with smooth gradients of color will tend to need more focus on shading, where smaller ascii art with more details in less characters will need more sharpness.

Why a slider for color?

This is simply because forum posts and signatures sometimes have length limitations. We try to combine consecutive matching colors to reduce the number of color code tags needed in the output, and the control lets you set the threshold of exactly when it considers two colors "close enough" to combine.

Why can't I paste an image URL?

Because we don't upload your images to a server (it runs online in your browser), modern browsers have a security restriction to disallow this page from accessing images on another. Instead of copying an image URL, just save the image to your desktop, and drag-and-drop it (or select it) from there!