Drawing Image Pixels to Powershell Console

Being honest, I’m not very proud of this script 🙂 , but I like the Beauty how “Thoughts become Things” ( Idea -> Script )

INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITIONS : 

Yesterday,  I was thinking about my graduation days how Image Processing in MatLab used to fascinate me! So I thought giving Images a try in Powershell.

Just to see if an Image can be drawn in the Powershell console I did some (A lot!) research and ended up with this script, but before we delve into it its time for some definitions which are following –

WHAT IS A PIXEL ? 

A Pixel (a word invented from “Picture Element“) is the basic unit of programmable color on a computer display or in a computer image.

Pixels indicates a color for each image unit along the horizontal axis or row (called the x coordinate) and a color for each Image unit along the vertical axis (called the y coordinate).

WHAT IS A BITMAP ?

A bit map (often spelled “bitmap”) defines a display space and the color for each pixel or “bit” in the display space.

A Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and a JPEG are examples of graphic image file types that contain bit maps. Pixels are nothing but color information spread on X, Y coordinates.

Following diagram show the directions in which pixels are spread across X and Y axis.

HOW IT WORKS :

LIMITATIONS : 

1. COLORS :

   Console is limited to only 16 colors leaving us with less choices. Hence, I have to write a small algorithm to find the Closest console color matching the color in a Pixel.
   So you want find the Image in the console very beautiful, but good part is it at least works 😉

2. SPEED : 

   Speed of drawing Image in a console depends heavily on the number of Pixels in the Image that is width multiplied by the height, so I would recommend that your image size doesn’t cross 150X150 otherwise image will be drawn a pretty slow pace, since the number of iterations will increase drastically for larger images.

   NumberOfPixels  = Width  * Height of the Image

 

HOW TO RUN : 

*This animation is a high speed version of the Original

GET THE SCRIPT :

Grab the script from my GitHub Repo Here

	Function Write-Pixel
	{
	param(
	[String] [parameter(mandatory=$true, Valuefrompipeline = $true)] $Path
	)
	Begin
	{
	[void] [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.drawing")
	# Console Colors and their Hexadecimal values
	$Colors = @{
	'FF000000' = 'Black'
	'FF000080' = 'DarkBlue'
	'FF008000' = 'DarkGreen'
	'FF008080' = 'DarkCyan'
	'FF800000' = 'DarkRed'
	'FF800080' = 'DarkMagenta'
	'FF808000' = 'DarkYellow'
	'FFC0C0C0' = 'Gray'
	'FF808080' = 'DarkGray'
	'FF0000FF' = 'Blue'
	'FF00FF00' = 'Green'
	'FF00FFFF' = 'Cyan'
	'FFFF0000' = 'Red'
	'FFFF00FF' = 'Magenta'
	'FFFFFF00' = 'Yellow'
	'FFFFFFFF' = 'White'
	}
	# Algorithm to calculate closest Console color (Only 16) to a color of Pixel
	Function Get-ClosetConsoleColor($PixelColor)
	{
	$Differences = Foreach($item in $Colors.Keys)
	{
	''|select @{n='Color';e={$Item}},@{n='Diff';e={[math]::abs([convert]::ToInt32($Item,16) - [convert]::ToInt32($PixelColor,16))}}
	}
	($Differences |sort Diff)[0].color
	}
	}
	Process
	{
	Foreach($item in $Path)
	{
	#Convert Image to BitMap
	$BitMap = [System.Drawing.Bitmap]::FromFile((Get-Item $Item).fullname)
	Foreach($y in (1..($BitMap.Height-1)))
	{
	Foreach($x in (1..($BitMap.Width-1)))
	{
	$Pixel = $BitMap.GetPixel($X,$Y)
	$BackGround = $Colors.Item((Get-ClosetConsoleColor $Pixel.name))
	Write-Host " " -NoNewline -BackgroundColor $BackGround
	}
	Write-Host "" # Blank write-host to Start the next row
	}
	}
	}
	end
	{
	}
	}
	#"JSnover.png" |Write-Pixel

view raw Write-Pixel.ps1 hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 

Hoping you’ll find it fun!! 🙂

Prateek Singh
Follow @SinghPrateik