I've been trying to get transparency to work with my application (which dynamically resizes images before storing them) and I think I've finally narrowed down the problem after much misdirection about imagealphablending and imagesavealpha. The source image is never loaded with proper transparency! // With this line, the output image has no transparency (where it should be // transparent, colors bleed out randomly or it's completely black, depending // on the image) $img = imagecreatefromstring($fileData); // With this line, it works as expected. $img = imagecreatefrompng($fileName); // Blah blah blah, lots of image resize code into $img2 goes here; I finally // tried just outputting $img instead. header('Content-Type: image/png'); imagealphablending($img, FALSE); imagesavealpha($img, TRUE); imagepng($img); imagedestroy($img); It would be some serious architectural difficulty to load the image from a file; this code is being used with a JSON API that gets queried from an iPhone app, and it's easier in this case (and more consistent) to upload images as base64-encoded strings in the POST data. Do I absolutely need to somehow store the image as a file (just so that PHP can load it into memory again)? Is there maybe a way to create a Stream from $fileData that can be passed to imagecreatefrompng?