Image to ASCII converter

Digital images are basically made up of a series of dots, which form observable shapes when viewed from a distance. If you’re feeling creative, you can try replacing these pixels with something else, such as ASCII characters.

Image to ASCII converter is an interesting application designed for this very purpose. It enables you to turn any picture into ASCII art, both color and grayscale.

You should be able to figure out how to use the application right away, as the user interface features a very straightforward layout. Sadly, though, it is not possible to load files using drag and drop.

Small-scale previews of the source and output images are displayed in the main window, so you can even try out various conversion parameters before saving the artwork.

When creating the ASCII output, the application tries to replace each pixel in the source image with a character that has the closest weight. Grayscale conversions are relatively straightforward, as color is not taken into consideration.

Of course, Image to ASCII converter is also capable of changing the color of each character based on the color of the substituted pixel. The color density of the output image will be quite low, but you can still get some pretty accurate results.

While the supported formats are not documented, the program seems to allow you to process JPEG, PNG, BMP and TIFF files; the output images can be exported to the same formats.

Image to ASCII converter certainly isn’t the first program of its kind to be created, but it stands out thanks to its intuitive design and the accuracy of the results. It also comes with a basic but novice-friendly GUI that makes it very easy to get started.