Hasta La Gadget!

Jan 10

Convert Images to ASCII Art, in Color!

Posted in: Freeware, Newly Released, Software, Tips and Tricks, Today's Chili

This article was written on October 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

Being the geeks that we are I’m sure you’ve tried at one time or another to create some sweet ASCII art. When you look at some of the ASCII art that has been done it almost looks like it should be simple, but there is an insane amount of time that is spent getting the spacing and character density just right.

You can now be the envy of all your ~~geeky followers~~ friends by generating your very own gallery of ASCII art. We’re not talking something as simple as the last trick we showed you either, instead this is a full-blown software application. It’s called ASCII Generator, and I found out about it today while doing our Daily Downloads. After I looked into it I knew that I had to give it a shot.

The nice thing is that ASCII Generator is an open source project, and doesn’t require any installation to run it. Once you have loaded an image into the generator it will pump a bunch of text into the main content area. There is the “Size” option on the top toolbar that can be used to decide how many characters are on every line, and the more characters you have the more detail you’ll see.

Once you’ve got all of the settings adjusted you’ll be able to save your artwork as an image or text file. The sweet thing is that it also adds color to the text to help give the ASCII art a more photo-like effect.

Below you’ll see an image that I converted of an extremely colorful garden. I set the Size as large as it would go so that I could capture as much detail in the photo as possible. Think about how long it would have taken to make something like that without the generator.