Color Modes: Palettes and Terminal Styles

ASCII offers nine color modes — including full source color, green and amber terminal palettes, retro chip palettes like CGA and Game Boy, and gradient ramps.

The color mode controls how each ASCII character is colored when drawn onto the canvas. You can preserve the original image colors, apply a monochrome or tinted terminal look, map to a retro chip palette, or build a custom gradient ramp. All nine modes respect the saturation and hue shift controls, and the background color picker applies to every mode.

Color modes

Name	Description
source	Full color sampled directly from the source image
source-boost	Source color with +50% saturation and a +10% lightness boost; maximum color is capped at 75% lightness
white	White on black; luminance mapped to a white grayscale
inverse	Black on white; luminance inverted for a photocopier look
green	Green terminal tint; RGB formula: (40 + lum×90, 160 + lum×95, 60 + lum×90)
amber	Amber terminal tint; RGB formula: (200 + lum×55, 130 + lum×80, 20)
blue	Cyber blue tint; RGB formula: (60 + lum×100, 180 + lum×75, 255)
gradient	Custom gradient ramp blending from a warm dark color to a cool bright color based on luminance
palette	Quantizes each cell’s color to the nearest entry in a selected retro palette

Palette mode

When you select Palette, a palette dropdown appears with five options:

CGA — 4 colors

The classic 4-color CGA palette: black, cyan, magenta, and white. Harsh and unmistakable.

EGA — 16 colors

The full 16-color EGA palette, covering the range of IBM PC graphics from the mid-1980s.

C64 — 16 colors

The 16-color Commodore 64 palette, with its warm browns, muted greens, and dusty purples.

Game Boy — 4 greens

Four shades of green: #0f380f, #306230, #8bac0f, #9bbc0f. Faithfully reproduces the original DMG LCD look.

PICO-8 — 16 colors

The 16-color PICO-8 fantasy console palette. Vivid, constrained, and immediately recognizable.

Palette mode combined with Ordered 4×4 or Ordered 8×8 dithering produces a convincing retro look. The Bayer matrix breaks up flat color regions into patterned halftones, mimicking how old hardware displayed gradients within a fixed palette.

Additional color controls

Saturation

The saturation slider runs from 0 (fully desaturated / grayscale) to 3 (tripled saturation). You can also type a value up to 5 in the numeric field. The default is 1 (unchanged). This control is applied before the color mode formula, so it affects all modes including source, green, amber, and blue.

Hue shift

The hue shift slider rotates all hues in the source by –180 to +180 degrees. At 0, colors are unchanged. A shift of +180 or –180 inverts the hue wheel. This is useful for creating color-shifted variants of an image without changing its luminance structure.

Background color

The background color picker sets the canvas fill color. The default is black (#000000). For inverse mode, consider a light paper color such as #f6f1e5. When you export a transparent PNG, pixels that match the background color (within a small tolerance) are made transparent.