Chromaglyph · Native macOS · In development
Turn photos and videos into fully glyph-rendered visual media.
Chromaglyph is a native Mac creative instrument that transforms source media into a coherent field of rendered glyphs — then lets you shape the result with color, palette, and restrained cinematic effects.
In development · Private early access
Chromaglyph demo video
How it works
The source becomes the glyph field.
Chromaglyph does not lay characters over an image. Metal processing analyzes the source frame, and for every cell in the output grid it selects a glyph and an ink color drawn from what it found there. The picture you get back is composed from glyphs — that is the image, not a layer on top of one.
For video, that analysis and selection runs frame by frame, held steady over time so the result reads as a moving glyph image rather than a field of flickering characters.
The workflow
Four steps, source to export
- Step 01
Bring in a photo or video
Drag an image or a movie onto the window, or open one from the command center. The source loads at its own resolution and, for video, with its audio track intact.
- Step 02
Choose a glyph language or custom palette
Twelve glyph languages ship — ascii, shades, unicode blocks, braille, technical, katakana, greek, runic, arrows, musical, emoji — or define your own set. Monochrome languages take their ink from the analyzed source color.
- Step 03
Shape the result
Adjust color and exposure, pick an output resolution and aspect, and add restrained cinematic effects if you want them. Everything is live on the rendered glyph field.
- Step 04
Export glyph-rendered media
Write a still image, a re-rendered video that keeps its original audio, a 24-bit color ANSI capture for the terminal, or self-contained HTML and plain text.
Output formats
Export the glyph render, four ways
Every export is the rendered glyph field itself — a picture made of characters, a video made of characters, or the characters as text.
Still image
PNG · JPEG · TIFF · HEICThe current glyph field, written at the chosen output resolution. The file format follows the extension you name.
Video, audio preserved
.movThe whole clip is re-rendered through the glyph pipeline offline — one rendered frame per source frame, at the source's own timestamps — and the original audio track is carried across by passthrough, so it is neither re-encoded nor knocked out of sync.
ANSI / terminal
.ans · .txt24-bit color ANSI that paints the glyph field in a terminal, or plain text. Video can be written as a per-frame text sequence.
HTML / text
.htmlA self-contained HTML document of the rendered field — the glyph output as something you can put on the web.
Optional · presentation only
Cinematic effects, kept separate from the render
Bloom, CRT curve, scanlines, film grain, and chromatic aberration are layers applied after the glyph field is rendered. They change how the result looks; they are not how the glyphs are made. A scene-driven masked stack with automatic cut detection lets those layers shift through a video without manual keyframing, and color grading sits alongside them — all neutral at zero.
Native Mac
Built for one platform, on purpose
Chromaglyph is a native Apple-Silicon application. There is no Intel, iOS, Windows, Linux, or browser version.
Apple Silicon, Metal 3
Built natively for Apple Silicon on the Metal 3 baseline, with newer GPU capabilities detected at runtime. macOS 14 or later.
Per-cell GPU compute
The heavy work runs on the glyph grid, not the raw pixel buffer: the source is analyzed and a glyph plus an ink color is selected for every cell on the GPU.
Temporal stabilization
A hysteresis feedback loop holds glyph choices steady through motion, so a moving source does not make the characters shimmer or thrash.
Output up to 5K
1080p, 2K, 4K, or 5K, at any aspect from 16:9 to square to the 9:16 / 9:19.5 / 9:20 portrait ratios used for Reels, Shorts, and TikTok.
Development status
In active development. Not on sale yet.
Chromaglyph is being built at D-CSIL. There is no App Store listing, public download, or payment flow. Access right now is a private test: email the lab and describe what you would use it for, and you will be sent a build when the early-access round opens.
Developed by D-CSIL
Under the hood
The engine architecture — render pipeline, per-cell GPU compute, continuous-coordinate simulation, and temporal stabilization — is documented on the project page.
Chromaglyph engine architecture