Just to make sure you know this: Adding text and/or rezising a jpeg will distort it, no matter which module you use. Thats because it has to be compressed again, and each time you do a jpeg compression you lose some quality.

GD will of cource distort it even further because of its 8 bit conversion.

Doing a search on search.cpan.org turned up the Imager module. Seems to be smaller than Image::Magick and has the features you need...

GoldClaw