All effects and presets

Effect

Ascii

Render the image as an ASCII character field using a mono atlas.

Long before monitors showed pixels as pictures, people drew with type. Nineteenth-century typewriter artists packed letterforms into portraits. Radio teletype operators swapped text images in the mid-twentieth century, and mainframe programmers in the 1960s printed greyscale scenes on line printers by choosing denser or lighter characters.

ASCII art later filled bulletin boards and early web pages when bandwidth was scarce. This effect rebuilds a photograph as a character field, trading continuous tone for the graphic cadence of a mono atlas.

Ascii example
Example

Properties

  • Characters

    Range
    Blocks, Letters, Compact, Minimal, Symbols
    Default
    Letters

  • Density

    Range
    14 to 70
    Default
    64

  • Tile aspect

    Range
    0.55 to 1.5
    Default
    0.55

  • Character color

    Range
    Colour
    Default
    1, 1, 1

  • Invert

    Range
    0 to 1
    Default
    0

  • Contrast

    Range
    0 to 3
    Default
    0.987

  • Crush dark

    dark area → space

    Range
    0 to 0.5
    Default
    0.036

  • Crush light

    bright area → max glyph

    Range
    0 to 0.5
    Default
    0

  • Overlay on image

    Range
    0 to 1
    Default
    0

Command line

Requires Rethings Pro. Install the tool from Rethings → Install Command Line Tool… 

rethings apply --effect ascii --set charSet=1 --set gridDensity=64 -i input.jpg -o output.png

Gallery

  • Ascii example 1
  • Ascii example 2
  • Ascii example 3
  • Ascii example 4
  • Ascii example 5
  • Ascii example 6
  • Ascii example 7
  • Ascii example 8
  • Ascii example 9
  • Ascii example 10
  • Ascii example 11
  • Ascii example 12
  • Ascii example 13
  • Ascii example 14
  • Ascii example 15
  • Ascii example 16
  • Ascii example 17
  • Ascii example 18
  • Ascii example 19
  • Ascii example 20
  • Ascii example 21
  • Ascii example 22
  • Ascii example 23
  • Ascii example 24
  • Ascii example 25
  • Ascii example 26
  • Ascii example 27
  • Ascii example 28
  • Ascii example 29
  • Ascii example 30
  • Ascii example 31
  • Ascii example 32
  • Ascii example 33
  • Ascii example 34
  • Ascii example 35
  • Ascii example 36
  • Ascii example 37
  • Ascii example 38
  • Ascii example 39
  • Ascii example 40
  • Ascii example 41
  • Ascii example 42
  • Ascii example 43
  • Ascii example 44
  • Ascii example 45