/me trying to ssh my server to find an example... Where is putty.exe? No way - server is down and it's saturday. Can't see http://pdl.perl.org either. Weird.

PDL will read() and write() images just like ImageMagick, but it will also allow you to access the image bits as data (an image is a perl object). And PDL comes with lots of image processing functions.

I'm sorry, I can't give you any examples right now :(