I know what you mean.... the Perl syntax for Image::Magick is often quite different from the commandline version, and the docs are not very clear. All I usually do is look through the demo.pl that comes in /ImageMagick-6.3.3/PerlMagick/demo, and see what it does. It's a fairly complete demo. Then there is the perl-magick-overview , (although I've sometimes found that it dosn't always have the correct syntax either). Finally, google, and groups.google searches, will sometimes yield clues to correct perl syntax for IM operations.