Solving GIFBUILDER image masking issues in TYPO3

I needed some masking for a recent project and I encountered several ImageMagick related problems, having tried with ImageMagick 4.2.9 and the latest version at the moment, 6.6.1.

Masking seemed not to work at all, no matter what version I used. After searching for the problem for a while, I applied Jorg Wagner's patch found on the TYPO3 bugs website. http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=13750

I apparently seemed to have had no luck, so I installed the latest GraphicsMagick version and used that one too. Same problem though, no masking applied to images, and the same errors in the backend. Combine using a JPG mask with graylevels worked almost as it should, and Combine using a GIF mask with only black and white didn't work at first, and then worked the other way around, meaning I had to set the "invert mask" fields to true, in the TYPO3 Install Tool.

Searching some more on the subject I found another post by Jorg Wagner about the TYPO3 Windows image combine functionality (http://www.typo3-jack.net/typo3-english-lists-netfielders-de/22328-typo3-english-graphicsmagick-combine-windows.html), and after clearing the temporary images generated by the install tool (typo3temp/install_*) and by GIFBUILDER (typo3temp/GB/*) masking finally worked on my machine.

So the problem was there because of the fact that no matter what graphics solution I used (im or gm, any version) the Image Processing (and namely Combining images) tests in the TYPO3 install tool used the same temporary image files; if they were generated by a previous test, they would still be used, oddly enough. Also, the GIFBUILDER images with masking applied were reused also, not regenerated after I cleared the Cache, as expected. After manually clearing those temporary files everything worked out just great.

These were the final system specs:

• TYPO3 v 4.3.3
• GraphicsMagick v 1.3.12
• Windows Vista 64bit
• PHP 5.2.8