How to Turn Any Image into ASCII Art (Free, in Your Browser)

11 October 2026 · 5 min read

ASCII art is a picture made only of text characters. Dense characters like @ and # stand in for dark or bright areas, and light ones like . and : fill the gaps between. It started with typewriter art in the 1890s. In 1966, Kenneth Knowlton and Leon Harmon at Bell Labs built a famous nude out of printed symbols, and ASCII art has been part of computer culture ever since.

Today you don't need to place characters by hand. An image-to-ASCII converter does it for you in real time, and you get to decide how it looks.

How image-to-ASCII conversion works

The converter lays a grid over your picture. For each cell it measures the average brightness, then picks the character whose "ink weight" matches it best from a ramp that runs from light to dense:

 .:-=+*#%@

A bright cell gets a dense character on a dark background, a dark cell gets a space, and everything in between gets something in between. Smaller cells mean more characters and more detail. Bigger cells mean a bolder, more graphic look.

Turn an image into ASCII art, step by step

1. Open Glyph Studio. It runs in Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox, with no sign-up.
2. Bring in your image. Drop it onto the canvas, paste it with ⌘V or Ctrl+V, or open Lab and choose Your media. Videos and GIFs work the same way.
3. Pick the ASCII style. Type "ASCII" into Find a style in the style tray at the bottom, or open the Type & Glyphs group.
4. Set the Font Size. This is the most important setting. Lower it for detail, raise it for a bolder look (more on this below).
5. Choose a Character Set and colour. Both are in the panel on the left.
6. Export. Press Export (⌘E). Choose Image for a PNG at up to 4×, Video for an MP4 of a video source, or Text to copy the characters themselves.

Pick the right photo

ASCII art reads brightness and nothing else, so contrast matters more than resolution.

• Strong light and dark areas. A white dancer on a black stage, a silhouette against the sky, a lit face in a dark room.
• A simple background. Busy backgrounds turn into noise around your subject.
• A large subject. Faces should fill a good part of the frame, or they dissolve into a handful of characters.

If your photo looks flat, raise Contrast in the Intensity section before you change anything else.

The settings that matter

Font Size

Font Size sets the size of each character cell, from 4 px to 64 px. It's the trade-off between detail and graphic punch.

As a rule of thumb, use 8–12 for a picture that should still read as a photo, and 18 or more when the characters themselves are the point, as in posters or titles.

Character Set

The character set is the ramp the converter picks from. Glyph Studio includes several:

You can also choose Custom and type your own characters from lightest to densest, such as a brand name or a word that matches the image.

Colour

By default the characters are white on black. Under Mark Colours, Ink Color changes only the characters, never the background:

• Source takes each character's colour from the photo.
• Vivid does the same with boosted saturation.
• Palette maps brightness onto a five-colour palette, such as Neon Night, Ember or Lagoon.
• Single Colour and Two-tone give you a classic green-screen terminal or a brand colour.

The Backdrop setting controls what's behind the characters: solid black, a solid colour, a blurred or original copy of the image, or None (Transparent).

Export your ASCII art

Glyph Studio gives you three kinds of output:

• As an image. PNG, JPG or WebP at 0.5× to 4×. Use PNG at 2× or 4× for posters and prints, because fine characters need the pixels.
• As text. The Text tab copies the actual characters, or saves a .txt or a colored .html file. Paste it into a code comment, a README, a terminal or a chat.
• As video. For a video or GIF source, export MP4 or WebM. Each frame is rendered on its own, so nothing is dropped.

For overlays in a video editor, set Backdrop to None (Transparent). Then export a PNG (it keeps transparency) or a transparent MOV. Exporting transparent video for After Effects walks through the video side.

ASCII art from video and your webcam

Everything above works on moving images too. Open a clip from Lab, or choose Webcam to see yourself as ASCII art live. On the webcam you can record the styled camera with your voice and save an MP4. All of it runs on your own GPU, so even the camera feed stays on your device.

If you like this look, dithering and halftone are its closest relatives: both build images out of a few marks instead of smooth tones.