blendit

Blend images with text and generate amazing looking posters.

Build

Install Rust if you haven't done it yet.

Clone this repository in a new directory and cd into it.

git clone https://github.com/alexvilanovab/blendit

cd blendit

Compile the project using --release flag so that it is fully optimized.

cargo build --release

That's it! You will be able to find the compiled binary at target/release/blendit.

Usage

USAGE:
    blendit [OPTIONS] <IMG> <TXT>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -f, --font-size <UINT>    Font size used when generating the poster [default: 24]
    -o, --output <IMG>        Where you want to save the JPEG with the generated poster [default: ./output.jpg]

ARGS:
    <IMG>    Image you want to blend
    <TXT>    Text file you want to blend

How to get better results

Use small images (~150x150px works good!). Have in mind that each pixel of the original image will be replaced by a character of 24x24px (if font-size argument is not specified).
Make sure that the images you use do not contain pure dark pixels. This would imply rendering a black character in a black background; hence, the character would not be visible.

Ideas for future implementations

Automatically resize and apply the needed color modifications to the original image in order to get a good result no matter how big or how dark it is.
Add a configuration argument that applies a hue color to the generated poster. This looks really good, specially on grayscale images.

Motivation

Even though I never published it I actually made exactly this same project using Processing back in 2017.

It wasn't until I found out about emosaic that I decided to port it to Rust.

By the way! these are my first lines of code using Rust so don't expect everything to be perfect.