GD seems pretty quick for me, as long as you arent generating thousands of images a second i'm sure it'll be alright, i save time by caching a lot of information before i started making the image. Caching the image and regenerating every x minutes/hours/days etc... would be an even better way to generate GD images. Although i suppose if you wanted to create a site that attempted to manipulate photoshop in a sense it might be difficult. BUT! atleast php has these functions just for emergenices, yeah! that's what we want PHP Team, more useless imaging features :D !