Easy ascii art generator image how to#
Easy ascii art generator image full#
Easy ascii art generator image software#
Easy ascii art generator image code#

Now, we could keep going from here, but since the final results depend largely on the grayscale version of the original image, wouldn’t it be nice if we allowed the user to have some control over the grayscale conversion? One way to do this is to let the user adjust the contrast of the original image and when done, convert it to grayscale. Were we are simply traversing all the pixels in the original image, computing the weighted sum and then assigning the result as the pixel’s new intensity. Public static Bitmap Grayscale(Image image) It is not the most efficient way, but in C# this can be easily achieved with: Each pixel’s intensity or grey value is simply the weighted sum of the values of its RGB components computed as follows: What I applied is a conversion that preserves the luminance (or luminous intensity) of the original image in the grayscale image. There are many methods that can be applied to obtain a grayscale version of an RGB image and I will only focus on the one I decided to use. Image pre-processing Grayscale conversion This would include, in the case we wanted to perform more operations than just a grayscale conversion, all the different operations and transformations applied to the image before the final mapping of the image to ASCII characters. Since a grayscale version of the original image can be easily obtained from the original image the final scheme of the process is: Overview of the process.Ī more general way of defining the “Convert to grayscale” step would be “Image pre-processing”.

Easy ascii art generator image full#

Getting closer to know the full the process. Since the ASCII art image is made only of black characters over a white background, which from a certain distance looks like a grayscale image, a good guess is that a grayscale version of the original image is the image used as a reference for the mapping.

Now we have to deduce if the image used as input for the mapping is the original image or if there has been some pre-processing applied to it before this mapping step. Since the final output is the ASCII image we won’t be too wrong if we assume that this is the last step of our process. Starting from the ASCII art image we will try to guess from where did it come and how it was obtained.Ĭlearly there has been a point in the process of generating the ASCII art image where each pixel or region of pixels from the original image has been mapped to a certain character. It is not the only method to develop a general scheme of what the program has to do, but in this case we will work our way backwards.

Easy ascii art generator image software#

One of the (first) things I tend to do when developing software is to devise which are the steps the program should take in order to achieve the desired outcome.

Easy ascii art generator image how to#

Any suggestions on how to improve it are welcome.

Easy ascii art generator image code#

Sorry if the code isn’t as clean or efficient as it could be or if the project architecture isn’t the ideal one. ( Disclaimer: I am currently learning C# and this was my first project – done with learning purposes. However, the main ideas can be easily implemented in other programming languages.

The example code presented is written in C#.

The post is about the algorithms and ideas that make the program work and not about a detailed explanation of the whole program.

The ideas that will be explained can be extended to any kind of process were the resulting image is a composition of other images and were the aim is to resemble a target or input image.

Finally, before we embark I would like to point out three things: However, we will implement and discuss some extra features or alternative implementations along the way in order to improve the results. It should be clear from the previous example that the output image has two main characteristics: it is composed solely of ASCII characters and it looks like the original image. Zooming a region of the image until characters are visible. And yes, it is only made of ASCII characters! This can be quickly checked by zooming in any section of the image. Not as impressive as you thought? If still not yet convinced (I promise this point will be revisited later on) take a look at the image at full resolution and stare at it after moving a few feet away from the screen. Original image (left) and output image (right).

For those of you who are not familiar with ASCII art, what we will achieve will look (more or less) like the image below.

Today we will try to generate ASCII art from images. In today’s post, we will also generate an image that will be the final output of our program, but with a totally different purpose and method. In the last post we discussed a simple method for procedurally generating 2D terrain.