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When using the rectangular marquee tool, sometimes I know the exact pixel dimensions that I need to be selecting. I would like to have the ability to specify a selection box size and/or ratio, rather than simply dragging an area.

Since there is no proper way to define precise selection size, the suggested way is to select an area with a selection marquee and scale and move that selection marquee using the transform panel. There is an issue with this approach however, as it seems the selection marquee scaling has some weird sampling and the resulted selection has blurry edges and is actually of a different size than what is specified in the transform panel. This behavior is amplified if the initial selection marquee is very small and is scaled to a very large size, as shown in the following example. Steps to reproduce: 1. Open a 2048 image and select a small area in the middle of the image using Rectangular Marquee Selection tool 2. Change X, Y, W, H of the selection to 0,0,2048,2048 3. Copy selection to clipboard and go to File -> New From Clipboard You can clearly see that the resulted pasted image has weird blurry edges. In a lot of cases when you copy and paste a scaled selection, the resulted pasted layer also has a weird increase in size and it differs from the selection that you specified and copied to clipboard. When the difference between the initial selection size and the final scaled selection is small, the issue is not so apparent but it is still there and is very frustrating. It's a "gamebreaking" issue when you need to precisely re-arrange parts of a flat image. You copy one area to the clipboard, you paste and the resulted pasted layer has the wrong size and blurred edges and is impossible to align and position to a new spot. It is mind-boggling that such a basic feature is so broken.

Create a simple document by opening a 600DPI PNG with Affinity Photo Sweep a rectangular selection, then use the transform panel to precisely size the selection to 1500x2100 (those are the numbers I was using, smaller ranges show similar issues) Copy Merged, then New From Clipboard and look at the dimensions of the resulting image. For me, it is nearly always off by 2 or more pixels in each dimension. Over on I described the problem initially, but have been redirected here. Uploading the actual files is prohibitively expensive (>100MB) but the problem seems relatively easy to reproduce. After some back and forward, Walt managed to create the same symptoms using Photo on Windows (I believe). (As an aside, the "newbie post limit" is a bit frustrating - I can appreciate that it relates to keeping spamsters and trolls out but when a persons first contact with the forums is to look for support on an issue, it is quite frustrating to discover that you can't provide a response to a question you are asked. Even switching to personal messaging only allowed a single reply - you should make very visible in the interface "as a newbie, you have (n) posts left today" - I'm going to assume it isn't there because I can't see it on this page)