Photoshop help with cropping

Factual Questions
1

I’m a long way from being proficient in Photoshop, although I’m somewhat competent. But one thing that I’ve always struggled with involves the exceedingly simple task of cropping an image. The specific problem I’m referring to is the relatively poor control I’m only able to get over exactly where the image should be cropped.

The “magnetic” aspect of Photoshop wants to move the cropping borders in much too granular a way: It “wants” to move them either all the way to the edge or to the next discrete point too many pixels in. How can I get finer control over the cropping boundaries?

2

Oh, I’m using Photoshop CS2 under XP.

3

Under “View” make sure “Snap” and/or “Snap To” are unchecked.

Okay, well I hope that works, then. I’ve got CS on a Mac.

4

Yep. that did it, thanks! I knew it would be something simple.

5

Or, if you like having snap on most of the time, you should be able to hold down something like control or alt or something to temporarily disable the snap behavior.

6

Zoom in, switch to the selection mask, and use the brush to fine tune your selection edges.

7

That’s no good for cropping. You want straight rectangular edges, and the brush is a poor tool for that.

I will often use the fixed ratio or fixed size features of the marquee tool, though.