Well ImageMagick is just bloated... there is no real way around it. There are a few alternatives on CPAN... Imager, GD or you can always write your own module (preferably based on some C code :) ).
Greetz
Beatnik
... Quidquid perl dictum sit, altum viditur.
Just wanted to give feedback on imager. I just installed Imager 0.41 and replaced my ImageMagick code with imager code and what once took 6 seconds to compute with ImageMagick took 8.5 seconds with Imager. I'm going to persue using lower level tools such as cjpeg, djpeg, etc.