Image to ASCII Art Converter
Convert a photo into text-based ASCII art by sampling brightness across a grid of characters, with adjustable width, inversion and display background.
About this tool
Your image is drawn onto a hidden canvas at a reduced resolution, one cell per output character. Each cell's average brightness is measured using the standard perceptual luminance formula (0.299×red + 0.587×green + 0.114×blue), which weights green highest because the eye is most sensitive to it. That brightness is mapped onto a ramp of characters from dense (dark) to sparse (light) — "@%#*+=-:. " — so shadows become dense symbols and highlights become spaces. Because monospace character cells are roughly twice as tall as they are wide, the sampling grid is adjusted so the final art isn't stretched vertically. Everything runs locally in your browser.
Choose the background to match where the art will be shown: on a dark background bright parts of the photo become dense characters, and on a light background (most text editors, emails and documents) dark parts do, so the picture never comes out as a negative. Transparent areas of PNGs are left blank. View the result in a monospaced font, such as in a code block, or the shape will be distorted.