IDE / environment for developing image tools?

Anyone know a software platform for testing & visualizing code that operates on images? My goal is to have a basic environment for viewing the images before and after filters, as well as basic libraries for image manipulation.

My use case is that I want to improve the quality of a photogrammetry tool for a specific and simple use case, but I don't want to build the whole stack.

Could imagine countless other uses in the AR / OCR spaces.

Have seen jupyter and matlab used for this, not sure what's state of the art though.