Image color quality problems

I have the following code that takes an existing image, creates a new one from it and writes some white text on top of that image: <?php header("Content-type: image/png"); $startingImage = "leftphoto_01.png"; $image = imageCreateFromPNG($startingImage); //$white = imageColorAt($image, 30, 215); $white = imageColorAllocate($image, 255, 255, 255); imageTTFText($image, 24, 0, 10, 25, $white, "arialbd.ttf", "This is a test"); imagePNG($image); imagedestroy($image); ?> Problem is, the "white" text isn't white -- it's a dingy gray color. From reading around, I thought maybe if I took an existing white pixel in the image and used that to set white, that might help (hence the commented out //$white = imageColorAt... line in my code above) That didn't help either. (and the pixel I sampled is exactly the shade of white I want) I am almost completely unfamiliar with color pallettes and how to manipulate them. Can someone shed some light on how I can get some clean, bright white text on my image? Thanks. --kurt