HTML and CSS have developed to such an extent that the depth and variety of features available to a web developer have never been greater. But when it comes to images and manipulating them there’s not a lot you can do, other than resize them in-browser (not a true resize, more of a squash or a stretch) and add borders. True, using JavaScript you can overlay one image on another and blend them by making one image semi-transparent, but that’s about the extent of it.

That’s where PHP comes to the rescue, thanks to the GD library of image functions, which most implementations of PHP now include by default