Cullen Knight - Looking Up Request (🤓-R)

[Jimster]

In the words of Tania Maria.. "Hello my friends, how you doin' ?"

I am working on a whim and recall Cullen Knight had one of the first ever uses of ASCII art to make the cover of his "Looking Up" set. I don't actually own this.

I want to put a high-res image of this cover into AI and get it to give me the ASCII back in a .txt file so it's like, a source clone of the image (minus the title lettering etc.)

The pics I can find on discogs etc are too low res for AI to decipher the ASCII characters. Has anyone got a big picture (like 4000px wide) or can take one, if you own the vinyl?

If you don't ask, etc.

 

[Jimster]

In the words of Tania Maria.. "Hello my friends, how you doin' ?"

I am working on a whim and recall Cullen Knight had one of the first ever uses of ASCII art to make the cover of his "Looking Up" set.
I don't actually own this. I want to put a high-res image of this cover into AI and get it to give me the ASCII back in a .txt file so it's like, a source clone of the image (minus the title lettering etc.)

The pics I can find on discogs etc are too low res for AI to decipher the ASCII characters. Has anyone got a big picture (like 4000px wide) or can take one, if you own the vinyl?

If you don't ask, etc.

Needs to be higher res than this.

 

[ketan]

Look within and you will find all the answers you seek...

I found this pretty big version right here on the strut - Raj shared a rip of the album and you thanked him for it, Jim!

Cullen Knight - "Looking Up" - Private Jazz Funk

For those that know, this is an amazing jazz album, with latin and african flourishes. The album is all original tunes from Cullen Knight, and Leon Mitchell.

community.soulstrut.com

The characters are pretty big and clear on the full version:

Image: https://community.soulstrut.com/uploads/editor/fq/hmkoqdu9sj6a.jpg

 

[Jimster]

I am so disillusioned with searches that this did not ring a bell, or occur, to me. Let's see what AI can really do; none of this "Imagining the future" bullshit or cat videos; this will be peak internet and I expect Morpheus to knock on my door when the .txt file manifests....

Thanks Mayne!!!!

 

[billbradley]

Look within and you will find all the answers you seek...

I found this pretty big version right here on the strut - Raj shared a rip of the album and you thanked him for it, Jim!

Cullen Knight - "Looking Up" - Private Jazz Funk

For those that know, this is an amazing jazz album, with latin and african flourishes. The album is all original tunes from Cullen Knight, and Leon Mitchell.

community.soulstrut.com

The characters are pretty big and clear on the full version:

Image: https://community.soulstrut.com/uploads/editor/fq/hmkoqdu9sj6a.jpg

When I did a google image search the image on SoulStrut had the highest quality compared to everywhere else.

 

[ketan]

Yeah, I didn't find it using the site search. I did an image search for the artist/album and filtered to "large" sized images, and back I came to the strut!

 

[kicks79]

I'm still constantly amazed at the archival wealth of knowledge on this site.

 

[Jimster]

It's a pretty tricky problem so far; all the OCR software wants to try and extract words out of the characters it can recognise... Hardest bit is the rhs, it's pretty grainy and if you flip the image to b&w it's a mess.

I am known for out-of-the-box ish though... Let's see...

 

[Jimster]

Well, I need to be able to run python somewhere...
And use tesseract-ocr
It uses the IBM1403 printer typeface

Restoring the IBM 1401

Is anyone willing to lead a project to restore an IBM 1401?” Mike Cheponis enthusiastically asked with a glint in his eye. I knew Mike after attending several of his DEC PDP-1 restoration sessions at the Computer History Museum. While most of my late night college hours were spent on DEC...

computerhistory.org

1403 Vintage Mono Pro typeface

1403 Vintage Mono Pro typeface, Designer: Jeff Kellem, Slanted Hall. Extensive language support (160+ languages) across multiple scripts, including Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew. Most of Adobe Latin 4 character set. Inspired by the 52 glyphs of the A and H chains of the 1960s era IBM 1403...

slantedhall.com

It's partially there...

 

[Jimster]

Needs tweaking but the logic is sound...

 

[Jimster]

Getting there...

 

[Jimster]

There were two way of doing it in my mind:

Way 1 : OCR on the big image and find every character in each line, and replace it with a fresh, exact same character from the IBM font in a new .txt file.

Way 2 : Work out how big the original grid was (132 cols by about 94 lines), divide the original pic into these squares and work out how light/dark each square was and pick a character that best matches that density.

The OCR was struggling on the og image as the characters are very closely spaced. In the end I did way 2 and made sure it only used the IBM1403 font. BONUS : The font comes pre-aged-looking so it's like old-skool printed. HMU if you want the font, I can't attach .ttf here.


Long story short, and after tweaking the grey scale recognition both ways, this was about the best :

 

[Jimster]

Also the girl is beautiful. You know someone's pretty when ASCII does them justice.

 

[Jimster]

Hang on, someone's at door:

 

[Jimster]

SoulStrut had the highest quality compared to everywhere else.

@RAJ Something for your tombstone, bud.

 

[ketan]

Noice!

I wonder if the they faded the characters a bit on the album cover to improve the illusion.

 

[klezmer electro-thug beats]

very devoted work to an extremely niche end, which makes it right up my alley. I might have just done it the old school way and literally typed it by eye once I had the typeface right. Wonder how they did it in '78.

 

[Jimster]

very devoted work to an extremely niche end, which makes it right up my alley. I might have just done it the old school way and literally typed it by eye once I had the typeface right. Wonder how they did it in '78.

Way 2, deffo. AI did the python pretty quickly and that was the heavy lifting; nailing the syntax. I told it how to do it.

I did find a way of contacting Cullen himself and I've asked him. I don't expect a reply but I'll let you know.

It's a good album btw, he's had a solid career.

 

[Jimster]

Noice!

I wonder if the they faded the characters a bit on the album cover to improve the illusion.

I think it's just the best they could print in 1978. The character spacing on the lines is down to the gearing on the printer. It's that nerdy. I had a friend back in 1978 who handed me a Winston Churchill printout done in the same way. The friend died young after getting a blood clot in his brain the day after getting teeth extracted. I had that printout for years and it got lost eventually. When I saw the Cullen cover it brought all that back.