Cypher Image to ASCII
Converts images into ASCII art with real-time controls and three themes.
What Cypher Image to ASCII is
Load an image, or drop one on the window, and watch it turn into ASCII art as you adjust it. Character set, density, width, brightness and contrast all update the preview live beside the original, and the result copies to the clipboard or saves as a text file. A Qt desktop app built on PySide6, with the conversion on a worker thread so the window never stutters.
Cypher Image to ASCII features
What it actually does.
Live controls
Density from 0.1 to 1.0, width from 40 to 200 characters, and brightness and contrast from 0 to 2, all updating the preview as you move them.
Character sets
Several ASCII sets, from dense to minimal, picked from a list.
Side by side
The original image on the left, the ASCII result on the right.
Drag and drop
Drop a PNG, JPG, JPEG or WEBP onto the window, or open one with Load Image.
Copy or save
Copy the art straight to the clipboard, or export it as a .txt file.
Three themes
Light, Dark and Cyberpunk, switched from the palette button.
How to use Cypher Image to ASCII
From a fresh install to the thing working.
1 Set it up
- Run python3 setup.py and choose conda or venv.
- Conda creates an environment called cypher-imagetotext with Python 3.10, installing Miniconda first if you do not have it. Venv makes a local venv/ folder.
- Or do it by hand: create a virtual environment and pip install -r requirements.txt.
2 Convert an image
- Start it with python run.py.
- Load an image, or drag one onto the preview area.
- Pick a character set and move the sliders until the right-hand side looks right.
3 Keep the result
- Copy puts it on the clipboard.
- Export TXT saves it as a text file.
4 Make it faster
- Images under 2 MB convert quickest.
- A width of 80 to 120 characters is a good balance. Narrower is faster.
- Simpler character sets process faster.
Built with
Licence
Made by Kencypher. Not open source.
Cypher Image to ASCII was written by Kencypher. The source is not published and is not licensed for reuse. You have permission to run it — that is the whole of it.
You may
- Run it on as many of your own machines as you like
- Use it for anything, including commercial work
- Pass an unmodified copy to a friend, free
You may not, without asking
- Sell it or charge for access
- Re-upload or mirror it anywhere
- Rebrand it or publish it as your own
- Decompile it or lift its assets
This is enforced. Re-uploading it, repackaging it, stripping the author's name off it or passing it off as your own is copyright infringement — protected without registration under the Berne Convention — and is pursued with DMCA takedowns to the host, CDN, app store and search engine, platform reports for impersonation, and legal proceedings where the infringement is commercial, repeated, or involves falsely claiming authorship.
Asking first is free, and the answer is usually yes — kencypher56@gmail.com. The only official source is this store; a copy from anywhere else is not one Kencypher published.
Good to know
- Conversion runs on a worker thread, so dragging a slider never freezes the window. The thread reports its progress as it goes, so a large image shows a bar rather than a frozen button.
- Three character sets ship with it: a ten-character ramp for clean shapes, a seventy-character one for photographs, and the ten-character ramp reversed for light backgrounds.
- Density thins the ramp rather than the image: at 0.5 it uses every other character in the set, which is how you get a poster look out of a photograph.
- Runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, on Intel and Apple Silicon alike.
- The preview uses a monospace font, so the columns line up exactly as they will in the text file.
- The Cyberpunk theme is not only a palette: it repaints the preview in cyan on near-black, which is the combination ASCII art was drawn for in the first place.