I've had good experience with
Image::Magick in terms of interface and the ability to DWIW. I'm not too sure if
Gtk::Gdk::ImlibImage is the best way to do image manipulation since that's not it's primary function (which is
loading images, and obtaining X-Windows drawables[1]) and it's not terribly portable. As for finding the the 'picture quality' all images are internally stored in
24-bit pixel data in RGBRGBRGB format, so the quality really only matters when you're outputting the image.
HTH
_________
broquaint
[1] taken from the docs, along with the the other extract in italics