Photoshop CS2. Actually it’s a great application. But I discovered a shortcoming in it this evening when I was exporting images for a website from a PSD template that a client sent me. It’s a fixed with website, so I want to fix the width of my selection to a certain number of pixels, then adjust the height of my selection according to what I see fit. Can PS do this? Noooo. It’s just not possible. You can select normal free selection, fixed aspect ratio or fixed size. So fixed size right? Nope. You have to set the height. It’s just insane that an application we pay $400 for can’t let me fix a single dimension size. It’s not like PS is new or anything, how can this really be missing???

Then I thought, well ok, I’ll turn snap on for the selection, and just do it manually snapping to the edge. No problem for the width now. Unfortunately, it’s an image where the maximum height is near the center, so it’s hard to get the correct height. No problem, it’s a big commercial application, we should be able to just get the selection partially correct and then resize it..nope! PS will not allow this. Siiiiighh.

Gimp on OS X. So PS fails, I know Gimp can do it. Indeed, I just fix the width and continue on my merry way. Of course, I messed up the height this time as well, but I just resized the selection on the fly. Got my selection correct, and right click and copy it. Go File -> New to create a new image with it only to find that it didn’t auto size the new image for me. Well that’s useless. Then I discovered that it is possible to right click on the image and use Paste -> As New Image, which is cool, because it’s less steps to achieve the same thing. The beauty? It works