Image to ASCII art in C# (why not?)

August 21, 2023August 19, 2023 by Walter S.

Creating ASCII art from an image involves converting the pixels of the image into appropriate ASCII characters based on their luminance or brightness. Here’s a basic implementation of this idea in C#

First, you’ll need the .NET Core SDK installed on your machine.
Create a new console project:

dotnet new console -n ImageToAscii
cd ImageToAscii

Add the required package for image processing:

dotnet add package SixLabors.ImageSharp

We are using top-level statements (less clutter):

using System;
using SixLabors.ImageSharp;
using SixLabors.ImageSharp.PixelFormats;

if (args.Length == 0)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Please provide the path to an image.");
    return;
}

string path = args[0];
ConvertImageToAscii(path);

void ConvertImageToAscii(string imagePath)
{
    using var image = Image.Load<Rgba32>(imagePath);
    char[] asciiChars = { '@', '#', '8', '&', 'o', ':', '*', '.', ' ' };

    for (int y = 0; y < image.Height; y++)
    {
        for (int x = 0; x < image.Width; x++)
        {
            Rgba32 pixelColor = image[x, y];
            float avg = (pixelColor.R + pixelColor.G + pixelColor.B) / 3.0f;
            int index = (int)(avg * (asciiChars.Length - 1) / 255);
            Console.Write(asciiChars[asciiChars.Length - index - 1]);
        }
        Console.WriteLine();
    }
}

To run just pass the full path of the image and the ASCII art will be printed on the console (use smaller images for better results).

dotnet run [path_to_your_image]