Whatever the upsides you percieve for using the marquee tool to crop, it is in my opinion indefensable compared with using the Crop tool. Its almost as bad as using the Brightness/Contrast command to lighten or darken a photo :D

...or mis-spelling preceive of indefensible :)

Photoshop's wonderful for offering different ways of doing the same thing, isn't it!

Yes Adey it is but it is one long learning curve to get to grips with all the functions. I find it can be to easy to forget some of the simple things.

LOL yes but I definately meant perceive :D

I left it in deliberately (though I typed it wrongly to start with!) and slipped-in a little 'of' instead of 'or' -just to see if anyone was paying attention:)

definately??

A case of 'you can't fool me I've been to colage' :D

Anyway, to get back on-thread, I promise to use the crop tool more in future!

One point to bear in mind, if you set a size for the crop, 6"x4" or 7"x5" say, be aware that if you also fill in a figure in the pixels/inch box it will 're-sample' the picture to fit, which means it will 'interpolate' the resolution - not good for a final 'save' of the image.

This may be fair comment, however the function is really for print sizing surely, not for saving the final image. If you need an exact size at 300ppi for example this is an easy way to do it.