I use Image::Magick (available from the ImageMagick homepage or precompiled from ActiveState) for image manipulation, but there is one big downside - there is no precompiled binary for ActivePerl 613, the latest build (that I know of). The old version simply crashes Perl. Other than that, Image::Magick is the way to go if you want image manipulation.

Currently I'm glueing the application together by using the command line interface to ImageMagick, which is slower but at least it works even under Perl 5.6 :)

For the ImageMagick package, you need the ImageMagick binaries for Windows and the PerlMagick binaries for Windows. The ImageMagick binaries are available here and the PerlMagick binaries for Perl 5.005 are available here, but remember that they don't work with Perl 5.6 / the latest ActivePerl build !

If anybody is so kind to compile me PerlMagick binaries for the latest ActivePerl build, please make them available to the general public or leave me a message :)