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);
?>