PHP comes bundled with GD (GIF Draw/Graphics Draw), which is a library for the dynamic creation of images. It can be used for simpler image operation, such as resizing, cropping, adding watermarks, creating thumbnails (Jeffrey wrote about it), applying basic photo filters - you've probably used it before. Unfortunately, if you want to create something more complex with GD, like Instagram effects, you can't. Luckily, though, we have ImageMagick!

He starts off by comparing the two graphics libraries and talks briefly about how to downliad and install Imagemagick on your development platform. Included is a PHP class to help you use it, coming complete with functions for changing the color tone of the image, adding a border and adding a vignette to the image. Also included are some "presets" represented in a few simple functions:

• Gotham
• Toaster
• Nashville
• Lomo
• Kelvin

There's also a few links to other resources you can use to find out more details on what Imagemagick has to offer.

Imagine a friend of yours approaches you one day and would like you to build her a website so she can showcase her photography. She wants to be able to easily upload her photographs and have them watermarked so that people can't easily steal them. "Don't worry!" you tell her, because you know there are functions provided by the Imagick extension that makes watermarking images a breeze in PHP.

He talks about things like watermark transparency, the size of it (how much of the image you want it to cover) and the contrast of the watermark image to make it stand out from the image enough to be useful. Their example image and script puts the PHPMaster.com logo over the center of the image and includes a bit of code showing how to scale the watermark image to fit the image (this versus this.

Vagrant ia a tool for building virtual machines (in VirtualBox's format) that conforms to a specification. It's written in Ruby, but it makes really no assumptions over the environments that you're gonna build; in this article, we will setup a virtual server for PHP applications running inside Apache.

The end result is a virtual machine based on VirtualBox images and can be built in a few easy steps:

• install the vagrant gems on the build system
• add a new virtual box instance pointed to a .box file
• create the Vagrant config (including the commands to run post-create)
• set up a little port forawrding
• creating a phpinfo file and starting up Apache

One suggested place for grabbing images (some with pre-defined software) is Bitnami's "Stacks" repository.

In my most recent venture with PHPMaster I was asked to write an article about watermarking images with PHP using ImageMagick. Virtually no documentation exists on the PHP API, although there are plenty of command-line examples from the official ImageMagick website. I spent a solid day and a half attempting to convert command-line code into PHP before (due to miscommunication) the topic was covered by someone else and my work was no longer needed. Although disappointed, it gave me something to blog about! Yay.

His script is pretty straight forward - it loads a sample image, sets up some watermark text and applies it with a "gravity" setting of "southwest" and adds it to the image (annotateImage). The output is pushed back out as a JPEG image. Also included is a slightly more complex example showing how to give the watermark an embossed look and a "text all over the image" look to prevent use of any part of the image, not just one section.

Creating Word document icons is very simple thanks to a service called LiveDocx. LiveDocx was created as a web service to allow the easy creation of most document formats from a simple template. However, it is possible to send a normal Word document as the template file and get an image of the file in return.

You'll need a LiveDocx account to be able to use the service - there's a free option of their service that uses a shared server. Included in the post is a sample script that defines a LiveDocx connection, pulls in a local Word document for parsing and calls a "getBitmaps" method on the service to return the raw image data. This is pushed into an image (using GD) as a PNG.

This is the final article in a three part series focused on setting up EC2 as a sandbox for application developers. I assume you have an AWS account with Amazon; if you don't, please read Part 1 to learn how easy it is to sign up. I also assume you have configured your development environment and installed an AMI; if you haven't, please read Part 2. In this installment, we'll learn how to install Apache, MySQL and PHP in our running AMI, and then clone the AMI to make our own.

Included in the post are all the commands you'll need to get the packages installed for PHP, MySQL, Apache 2, PEAR and the PHP command line binary. With all of that installed, they show you how to create an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) to make it easier to scale in the future.

If you're working online, then canvas springs to mind. It allows you to draw raster graphics quickly and easily. If you want, there are also plenty of image code libraries that can generate GIFs, JPEGs and PNGs on request. But what if your target isn't always online? What if you're aiming for print? Then you could use a raster graphic, but it would need to be pretty large. A better solution is to create a vector-based image format from your code. This is where SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) steps in.

He starts by explaining a bit about SVG and what it is for those that haven't worked with it before. He givesn an example of a poster from Wired showing circles with colors from their covers over the last 15 years. He shows how to do something similar with images of the .net magazine covers, pulling out the color frequency with the imagecolorat function. Toss in a bit of markup and some formatting of the color output and you'll get circles with concentric rings with the most prominent colors ending up the largest. You can see his result here.

I will show you how to use GD library. And, main task today is adding watermark to image and generate result as PNG image into browser. We will using PHP and GD library. This is nice library to work with images at server side. Also (as additional tasks) I will draw little frame over image and will draw some text. Between, you can use this method (of adding watermarks in realtime) to protect original photos.

Full code for the script is included in the post, showing the combining of two images into the one finished product. The code is also available for download if you'd like to get hacking right away.

To desaturate an image means to remove all non-greyscale colours from it, essentially creating a black and white version. To do this you can use the function imagecopymergegray(), which is part of the GD image library. This function is a little difficult to figure out, but what is does is sample one image into another and optionally changing the amount of colours that are kept during the sampling process. The function can be made to sample just a section of the image, or the whole thing.

He also offers an alternative method that uses imagefilter instead, passing it the IMG_FILTER_GRAYSCALE flag. Included is a full block of code for a method he recently included in a WordPress site to dynamically create thumbnails.

Today I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to strip exif data from an image using Imagick. The first port of call was the (pathetic) documentation at php.net. I searched for 'exif' but found nothing. [...] I was tipped off by a colleague to the method Imagick::stripImage() which apparently did what I wanted. The only mention of exif is in a rather helpful comment at the bottom of the page.

This comment pointed him to the Imagick::stripImage() function that pulls off the data and returns exif information (or, as the documentation calls it, "profiles and comments"). His seven line script is included in the post that initializes the Imagick object, pulls in the file and runs the stripImage() method with the option for "exif:*". The resulting properties are then displayed including aperature value, date taken, exposure time, make and model of the camera, shutter speed, resolution and much more.