Alternate's ASCII Artist

Art can’t really be defined, since it can be made out of anything, even if not palpable. What’s more, it’s greatly enhanced by computers, and one suitable example in this regard is Alternate's ASCII Artist, letting you transform any of your pictures into their correspondents built from all kinds of characters.

After a quick and effortless setup process, you’re free to take the app for a spin and see what it can do for you. A compact main window shows up as soon as you launch it, with a neat arrangement of elements that lets both beginners and experienced individuals to quickly get the hang of it.

The first step is to load an image file to transform to ASCII code, but this can’t be done by simply dragging the target file over the main window, so you need to rely on the browse dialog. There’s an additional gradient file you can use, in case there’s a custom palette you have in a TXT file.

A small preview of the image is shown, also acting as a real-time updating image of all changes you perform. There’s the possibility to define the chosen gradient file by filling in two separate fields with color tone, as well as characters to use.

However, the most impact is delivered by the intensity slider. It can be used to set three different layers, such as median, lower, and upper intensity cutoff. In other words, it lets you configure the amount of color and detail to be emphasized. There’s another panel you can use to set conversion parameters to resize the final picture, either in percentage, or pixels.

The result might leave you scratching your head for a little while, not because it’s not done correctly, but through the ambiguous saving method. There’s no option to generate a file directly. Using two options, you can either get a plain TXT file, or HTML page, but these are opened directly in the default viewer, so you need to locate their location in the temp directory to save.

To sum it up, Alternate’s ASCII Artist is a fun little utility you can use to convert almost any kind of picture into ASCII art. However, don’t select a picture with too many details, because these are not properly represented by characters, and customization options might not be quite clear to all individuals.