Crop to a specific size

[FedeG26]

I’m having problems with the crop tool.
I have a picture, say a 1280x600 pixels image. What I want is to crop it to an area that’s 600x600 pixels.

See the attachment. I basically want to crop an area that’s as big as the grey square. But I think I’m missing something: I’ve selected the absolute dimension mode (that’s called resample - ricampiona - in Italian, for some reasons) and I’ve set the H and W dimension; but the cropping area has not the same size of the square, instead it fits to the canvas area. At this point I can’t tell the difference between the absolute dimension mode and the custom ratio mode, since they seems to give the same result. Instead I need that the cropping area automatically resizes to the pixel height and width that I set (see the second attachment, an handmade simulation of what I want).

Am I missing something or maybe the cropping tool is not fully developed at the moment?

[stokerg]

Hi FedeG26,

Once you've set the 600 by 600 you can then alter the appearance of that box, so if you make it smaller and position it so the area you want to crop is covered, if you now apply the crop, you'll have a 600 x 600 image  

[FedeG26]

Thank you stokerg for the tip.

The thing is that sometimes I use the crop tool when I have to select an area of an specific size. So say that I have a picture and I need a squared area of 600px on the side. If I manually alter the size of the cropping area, I won’t know if I’m cropping an area of the original picture that is bigger or smaller or the size I’ve set. Of course the resulting image will be 600px, but that’s only because it is resampled. It could happen, for example, that I crop an area of 120x120px that then is resampled to fit the 600px square. So I’d have a loss of quality.

It should be a lot more useful if I could see immediately how big the actual 600px area is going to be, so there is no need to any resampling process.