Laravel 5.6 - use imagecreatefromstring on retrieved image

I have a Laravel 5.6 project and am retrieving an image like this...

$image = $request->file;

I am wanting to use PHP to further process this image, I have tried..

$source = imagecreatefromstring($image);

But this tells me the data is not in a recognised format, how can i grab the image in a way that I can use imagecreatefromstring with?

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