Using the marquee tool in Photoshop CS4?

[Feek]

I'm trying to select an area of an image to crop and to make it a specific size - Is there any way I can get a live display as I enlarge the selected area with the marquee tool so I know I'm selecting the right number of pixels?

I have a wallpaper I need to grab an area out of to fit a specific screen.

[Joe 90]

afraid not.

but if i got the idea of that correctly, copy and paste the whole thing into a new image of the correct size, move the image into place and save.

[divine]

You can fix the size of the marquee tool also (top of the screen, where it says Normal), if that'd help.

TBH though, i'd probably do it the above way anyway, into a new image.

[Feek]

Thanks lads.

What I ended up doing was using the canvas size tool and setting it to the size I wanted, that worked but the image itself looked crap because the starting size was far too large and I didn't get enough on the new image.

So I resized the original image to the correct height, then resized the canvas to the required size. That worked perfectly :)

[Desmo]

I've always just fixed the size of the tool, seems to be the easiest way to me. You can keep resizing it and you'll see exactly what you're going to get.

[Feek]

I didn't realise until I came back in here how to fix the tool size otherwise I would have done that :)

[Joe 90]

That sounds a good way of working - never seen that option myself, but that's always the problem with PS - there's just so many ways of working!