Image manipulation generally requires quite a bit of processing so, although such things could be done in pure Perl, it would be very slow and would probably use memory very inefficiently (which worsens performance markedly). In any case, such code would be fairly large so even if it were pure Perl, it would still be in a module. Really, for any non-trivial task, asking for a solution that doesn't use "extra" modules has a single likely answer: "No can do.".