I uploaded Imager 0.47_01 to CPAN last week as a pre-release to 0.48.
Imager 0.48 adds the API I mentioned last month, some other minor features and fixes.
If you get a chance to test it please let me know of any problems. If you're using the CPAN shell you can use:
test T/TO/TONYC/Imager-0.47_01.tar.gz