Creating a Palette‑Based Image with PHP's imagecreate() Function

The imagecreate() function in PHP creates a blank palette‑based image resource with the specified width and height.

It returns an image identifier that can be used with other GD functions such as imagecolorallocate(), imagestring(), imagepng(), and imagedestroy() to draw, color, output, and free the image.

The example code sets the HTTP header to indicate a PNG image, creates a 100×50 image, allocates a white background and a custom text color, writes the string “A Simple Text String”, outputs the PNG data, and then destroys the image resource.

<?php
header("Content-type: image/png");
$im = @imagecreate(100, 50) or die("Cannot Initialize new GD image stream");
$background_color = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255);
$text_color = imagecolorallocate($im, 233, 14, 91);
imagestring($im, 1, 5, 5, "A Simple Text String", $text_color);
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);
?>