Just use Pillow and python.

It is the only way to do real image work these days, and as a bonus LLMs suck a lot less at giving you nearly useful python code.

The above is a bit of a lie as opencv has more capabilities, but unless you are deep in the weeds of preparing images for neural networks pillow is plenty good enough.

pyvips (the libvips Python binding) is quite a bit better than pillow-simd --- 3x faster, 10x less memory use, same quality. On this benchmark at least:

https://github.com/libvips/libvips/wiki/Speed-and-memory-use