User name as Watermark

Question

Ok, I searched the internet and stackoverflow but I just can't seem to find an answer for my problem.

I need to watermark images uploaded by users dynamically, but I don't want just text applied on an image. I need a real watermark like this:

The only way I can achieve this effect is by using Photoshop, adding shadow and decreasing the filling to 0%. But if my site is visited by 200 users who upload their images, I just can't make for everyone of them a new PNG file with their user name. That's why I'm looking for a dynamic solution for this problem.

I already found classes how to add a png file as a watermark to images, but like I said before this won't work if my site is visited by a lot of users.

I hope someone knows a way how to solve this and get the same effect on images dynamically.

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

The documentation of the ImageMagick image processing library includes such a transparent watermark example. Even if you would like to use GD instead of ImageMagick, it might give you an idea of how to do it.