GD looking more like Photoshop these days
 

In addition to the one over here about the 12 signs of a bad programmer, another article I found rather enlightening was this one on GD. Amazed at how many various filters that have been included in GD!

I'm sure Adobe are keeping a close eye on the developments as if anybody decides to incorporate that into a killer system - an online Photoshop (although I know there are some about) may well wipe Photoshop off of the map. Especially with the Internet applications taking over these standalone applications in a big way as of late.

Surely sooner or later they'll be a merge between desktop and Internet!

Some of the more interesting GD filters:
(See article for a full list.)

The imagefilter function is a really great thing to play with. Tied in with imageconvolution you can really achieve some cool effects.

yea but it's still pretty limited, when lens flares can be done ..that would be amazing ..it sorta can but you'd need to have a flare image to overlay on top.

What is it like in comparison to ImageMagick? I've heard a lot about ImageMagick but I've never really had a play around with it. From what I heard it supports a lot more fancy techniques than GD does. If that's the case then I wouldn't mind having a little play some time soon.

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ImageMagick is vastly more powerful than GD, each have their own strengths and weaknesses. To give a little idea of what can be achieved with ImageMagick visit Pixelmator which is an image editing application (for Mac, built using Cocoa) based on ImageMagick. It's not an online app, it sure is impressive (to me at least). :)
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I did have a cool little page somewhere which allowed me to dynamically add/change various filters on an image using the imagefilter function -- I'll see if I can dig it up. :)

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 !

now thats cool, cheers for that, it made an interesting read.

...Or an interesting look more than anything else! I never read any of the PHP code, I was too fascinated with the images because they had been created using PHP. I'm like a kid in a sweet shop :-( !