In a new article today, DevShed takes a closer look at the most popular graphics library for PHP - GD:

The GD library comes bundled with both PHP 4 and PHP 5. While it is a popular library that has been around for a while, many web developers do not take full advantage of its capabilities. In this five-part series, we will take a close look at what the GB library can do for you, especially in the area of dynamically-generated graphics.

This first in the five part series introduces the library showing how to make images from scratch in two ways - the more "normal" method and an alternate method using streams (which they use to create a dynanmic GIF image).