PHP imagecolorallocate not working

Question

I am running a site off of BlueHost, with PHP 5.4, and GD Version bundled (2.0.34 compatible) - a high enough GD to use imagecreatetruecolor()

I am cropping an image, and sometimes the cropped image does not entirely fill the output thumb. imagecreatetruecolor() leaves it with a black background wherever the resampled image isn't covering the output thumb, as shown below

but I would like it to be a WHITE, or TRANSPARENT background.

PHP:

$tci = imagecreatetruecolor($w, $h);

$color = imagecolorallocate($tci, 255, 255, 255);
imagefill($tci, 0, 0, $color);

imagecopyresampled($tci, $img, 0, 0, $x, $y, $w, $h, $wOr, $hOr);
imagejpeg($tci, $preview, $qual);

I am not having an issue with resampling the image, or using imagecreatetruecolor(), but for whatever reason, I cannot get the background color to white.

Thank you in advance.

EDIT

If I comment out the line

imagecopyresampled(...)

then it gives the correct background color that I set in imagecolorallocate and image fill. It's the imagecopyresampled that's causing the problem.