On php|architect's C7Y community site Scott MacVicar has posted a new comparison of two of the main graphics platforms available to PHP - the GD and Imagick extensions.

If you want user interaction on your website then you probably accept the upload of some media, including images. Within PHP there are two different libraries available that provide functionality for handling images, GD and the Imagick extension. This article takes a brief look at each of these libraries.

Since GD comes bundled with PHP these days, he gives a brief installation tutorial for the Imagick extension. After that he compares the two with code for three different bits of functionality - identifying image types, working with EXIF data and modifying a current image (change format/resize).

Mikko Koppanen has a quick post today showing how to use PHP and Imagick to create an image of text filled with another image layer behind it:

The fill pattern is used to annotate text but the named pattern could also be used to fill any shapes that allow fill to be specified (include circles, ellipses, rectangles, polygons etc etc).

His example is pretty simple (with a "Hello World!" output) that pulls in the background image, creates the composite layer over it, adds the text to it and sets the fill to the background image's layer. The whole this is wrapped up and output as a PNG file.

Hasin Hayder has provided some instructions he's created to install the Imagick extension for PHP on a Ubuntu linux system (7.10) in a new blog entry.

I already have ImageMagick installed in my machine and I tried to install the Imagick extension for PHP but I was stuck with strange errors. I have spent couple of hours today to figure out what I did wrong and Why I cant build that extension. Finally I've figured out that I must install ImageMagick from source first to build that extension. Heres how to.

He walks through the install, talking about where to get the package from, where to get the PECL extension for PHP and the compile process (with the result of a .so file PHP's extension can use).

Mikko Koppanen has another image tutorial posted to his blog today - this time the focus is on padding a thumbnail with the color of your choice automatically.

Today's example originates from a question asked by a user. How do I thumbnail the image inside given dimensions proportionally and fill the "blank" areas with a color? Well, the answer is here.

His code pulls in the source image, generates a thumbnail from it and makes a new image (the background) that's a bit bigger than the thumbnail. From there, the thumbnail is laid on top and the whole thing is output as another PNG. An example of the input and output image is included.

Mikko Koppanen has another quick new tutorial on using Imagick in your applications - this time it's about making buttons dynamically.

The button in this example is created after this tutorial http://xeonfx.com/tutorials/easy-button-tutorial/ (yes, I googled "easy button tutorial"). The code and the button it creates are both very simple but the effect looks really nice.

The example code creates a simple round button with a fill color and white text. Their examples show a red, green and blue buttons.

Mikko Koppanen has another example of using the Imagick functionality to create an advanced image - this time, it's about adding a reflection (similar to some of the effects Apple uses in their designs).

Here is a simple example of creating a reflection of an image. The reflection is created by flipping the image and overlaying a gradient on it. Then both, the original image and the reflection is overlayed on a canvas.

Both the code and an example image are included in the post.

In the latest entry to his blog, Mikko Koppanen shows how to take the power of Imagick and harness it to check and see what sorts of colors an image contains:

The code in the example reduces the image colors to 10, then discards all but one pixel of every color and then creates the palettes out of those colors. This might not be the most accurate way to do this, but at least it's fast.

His code makes three different "palettes" from the image - average, dark and light - and outputs them as a range of colored boxes for each all of the three palettes. Examples of the output are also included in the post.

Mikko Koppanen shows how, in his latest blog post, to take an image and trim it down with Imagick to get rid of extra surrounding background information.

Especially product images usually "suffer" from this issue; the product itself is composited on a white background and there are large areas of white around the object.

This is a simple example to demonstrate how to easily trim the areas off the image and only display the parts where the object lies.

His example code, a quick 16 line affair, takes in the test image, looks for a RGB value given and uses the built-in trimImage function to reduce its size.

Mikko Koppanen has another post to his blog today that once again shows the combination of PHP and Imagick to create/output an image - this time, it's a simple line graph.

This example demonstrates how Imagick can be used to create graphs. This graphing class itself is mostly a demonstrative example. There are also some hardcoded values in the graph (like the steps in the values on the left hand side) but it should not be hard to refine it into a more elegant graphing solution.

The graph is made using the Imagick drawing functions that extends the standard "draw" class. The code produces a graph with a (straight) line drawn from point to point - code and output examples are both included.

Mikko Koppanen has another blog entry posted dealing with image manipulation with PHP and Imagick, this time it's a cool little script that lets you pick your watermark's color based on the image's background luminosity.

Usually images are watermarked using a predefined color (let's say for example "white"). How well does this actually work when you're doing the watermark on a light or even a white image? The answer is simple: not very well.

His example uses the ImagickPixelIterator to check the luminosity of the background and assigns the text a value between black and white according to the background. Complete code with usage and examples of the resulting images are included.