imagerotate seems to be very fussy about handling transparency when copymerging onto another image. You can use the GD library's other transparency features to cover up the fact imagerotate gets it wrong HOWEVER it will only work if the top-left corner of the image is transparent at all rotations, so make the image a little bigger than it needs to be. This has been tested with png32 but does not work entirely for png8, as a phenomena creates noise around the rotated image.
<?php
$imgImage = imagecreatefrompng("image.png");
$colBlack = imagecolorallocate($imgImage, 0, 0, 0);
$imgImage = imagerotate($imgImage, 360 - $intHeading, 0);
imagefill($imgImage, 0, 0, $colBlack);
imagecolortransparent($imgImage, $colBlack);
imagecopymerge($imgOriginalImage , $imgImage, $intX, $intY, 0, 0, $intHeight, $intWidth, 100);
imagedestroy($imgImage);
?>
Note. $intHeading is in degrees clockwise :)
