Image to ASCII Art Converter

ASCII art draws a picture with letters and symbols: dense characters like @ and # for dark areas, light ones like . and spaces for bright areas. This converter averages the image into a grid of character cells, maps each cell's brightness to a character, and gives you the text to paste into code comments, READMEs, chat or a terminal, plus a PNG of the result. Your images are processed in the browser and never uploaded.

How to use this tool

1. Choose one or more images (PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF or SVG).
2. Set the width in characters — 80–120 suits a terminal, 40–60 a chat message.
3. Pick a character set; Detailed shows the most shading, Blocks looks solid.
4. Adjust contrast and brightness, or turn on dithering for smoother gradients.
5. Copy the text, or download the PNG or TXT file.

Formula

brightness = 0.299 R + 0.587 G + 0.114 B · character = ramp[⌊brightness ÷ 256 × number of characters⌋]

Each cell is the average of all pixels it covers. Rows = width × (image height ÷ image width) × character aspect; 0.5 compensates for characters being about twice as tall as wide. Contrast uses the standard factor 259(C + 255) ÷ (255(259 − C)). Dithering spreads each cell's rounding error to its neighbours (7/16, 3/16, 5/16, 1/16), which reads as smoother shading at small sizes.

Example

A 160 × 100 image at a width of 40 characters gives 40 × (100 ÷ 160) × 0.5 = 12.5, rounded to 13 rows. A blue area with brightness about 96 becomes * in the Simple set (96 ÷ 256 × 10 = 3.75 → the fourth character), and an orange area about 167 becomes -.