Image to ASCII Art

What this tool does

Turn a photo into ASCII art without uploading it. Drop, paste, or choose an image and it is sampled into a grid of characters: dark areas become dense symbols, bright areas become spaces. Everything runs on your device.

Choosing a character ramp

Each pixel's brightness is mapped to a character. Ramps run from densest to lightest, so the standard @%#*+=-:. set puts @ on the darkest pixel and a space on the brightest. Blocks uses shaded block glyphs, Detailed uses a 70-step ramp for smoother gradients, and Minimal keeps the output to two symbols and a space. Pick Custom to supply your own ramp, densest character first and a trailing space last.

Toggle Invert to swap the mapping, which is useful when the subject is lighter than its background.

Width and tone

The width slider sets how many characters wide the result is; the row count follows the image's aspect ratio, corrected by half because monospace cells are about twice as tall as they are wide. A width of 80 to 140 reads well in a terminal or a code block.

Brightness, contrast, and gamma adjust the image before it is mapped. Raise contrast when a low-contrast photo collapses into a flat block of characters, and use gamma to lift or crush the midtones without clipping.

Background and export

Dark background flips the mapping so the character art stays readable on a dark page, and the preview switches to a dark surface to match. Copy the result as plain text or download it as a .txt file for a README, a terminal, or a comment.