I found a PHP GD script that would create the reflections I wanted to produce. However, the script was designed to retrieve an existing image file and I was creating the title image on the fly sending directly to the browser. I got around this by writing a temporary PNG file and then retrieving that file to manipulate for the reflections.

As design styles come and go, I expect that I will remove the extra step for the reflections when it drops out of vogue. However, this whole process has yielded what I think will be a valuable feature for the blog fm platform.