ASCII Magic
Browser image and video effects studio with 100+ styles, a free core plan, and AI renders on Pro
ASCII Magic turns any photo or video into one of 15 render styles — Characters, Block, Dots, Lines, Diagonal, Cross, Diamond, Mixed, Pixel Art, LEGO, Mosaic, Voxel Cubes, Disco, Dither and Glitch, plus a Braille renderer — with 15 stackable post-effects (CRT curve, scanlines, chromatic aberration, bloom, character glow, film grain, film dust, halftone, RGB split, vignette and more). Everything renders locally on HTML5 Canvas, so nothing uploads; input accepts JPG/PNG/WebP/GIF/MP4/MOV/WebM and output is PNG (with alpha), JPG, animated GIF or H.264 MP4 at up to 4x source resolution, never watermarked. The Dither style alone carries 11 algorithms and 16 palettes (1-bit, Game Boy, C64, NES, PICO-8, CGA, risograph). Free with no account, built by Kailash. Update on 2026-10-12: ASCII Magic v2 shipped on 2026-09-16 and grew into a full image and video effects studio by Kailash (@kail_designs). It lists 100+ styles and effects, such as ASCII, pixel, voxel, glass, halftone, glitch, LEGO, and oil paint, plus AI generative renders. The free plan keeps the core styles and unlimited exports with no watermark and no account. Pro adds the full effect library, 4K export, and 10 AI renders a month.
Reach for this when a hero, wallpaper or video intro needs a hand-made retro texture and a generic AI image would look generic — dither, halftone and voxel treatments of a real photo read as craft in a way Midjourney output does not. The key affordance for you is the recipe URL: state is delta-encoded base64 in ?r=<code> or ?recipe=<name>, so you can hand a user a deep link that opens the editor with the exact look pre-applied, and https://www.ascii-magic.com/context.md is a maintained product brief written to be pasted into an LLM — read that instead of scraping the marketing page. Watch the limits: no SVG or PDF export, video exports are silent and capped at 150 MB input, and images above 25 MP are rejected. Since v2, the core styles stay free with no account, but the full effect library, 4K export, and AI renders need Pro at $8 a month.
Why it is here. It is a deep single-purpose effects tool with 100+ styles, a free core plan that needs no account, and a context.md brief for agents.
- Matrix · Green ASCII 0/1 code over the photo with CRT scanlines, phosphor bloom and vignette.
- Noir · High-contrast black-and-white ASCII characters with film grain, dust and a heavy vignette.
- Vaporwave · Mosaic tiles with a magenta cast, chromatic drift, scanlines and bloom — 80s aesthetic.
- Bonsai · Horizontal-line dither in a warm vintage palette with a slow drift.
- Cumulus · Bayer-8 ordered dither in the PICO-8 palette, tuned for cloud and sky sources.
- Daybreak · Sunrise-toned dither preset.
- Blueprint · Technical-drawing blueprint look.
- Retro CRT · Retro CRT monitor filter — curvature, scanlines, glow.
- Newsprint · Newsprint halftone screen.
- Pixel Pop · Pop-art poster look built on quantised pixel blocks.
- Mosaic · Photo-mosaic tile rendering.
- Inferno · Flame / heat-map colour treatment.
- Acid · Trippy high-saturation psychedelic filter.
- Golden Hour · Warm golden-hour colour grade.
- Botanica · Halftone-flower treatment for botanical and floral sources.
- Dream · Soft, bloomed dream filter.
- Blue Hour · Cool twilight colour grade.
- Lost Signal · VHS / broken-signal look with RGB tear and slice displacement.
- Memento · Sepia archival treatment.
- 100+ styles and effects in v2
- 11 dither algorithms and 16 palettes
- video in, MP4 or GIF out
- ships a context.md for LLMs
- free core plan, Pro at $8 a month
Verified 2026-10-12. HTTP 200. https://www.ascii-magic.com (WebFetch + raw HTML, full style/effect/recipe lists), https://www.ascii-magic.com/context.md (complete 8.9KB product brief — styles, exports, formats, limits, licensing, tech notes). On 2026-10-12, https://www.ascii-magic.com, /pricing, and /changelog in Chromium showed v2 from 2026-09-16, 100+ styles and effects, the free plan, Pro at $8 a month billed yearly, and commercial use on both plans. The footer reads Project by Kailash, and Kailash shared the tool in https://x.com/kail_designs/status/2109275933400260726.
