Selecting an area of a photo

[peasepud]

Hi all,

I've been using Photoshop (Version 7.0) for a while now and can do some useful things but feel I've only scratched the surface of whats available and as a result find Im doing repetitive tasks many many times.

One thing I have to do for a client is resize pictures to 170 x 255 however many of the pictures I receive are totally different dimensions eg if they were 240 x 510 then the Image > Image Size would be straight forward. Many of them though are received as landscape pics of which only a part of the pic is required eg

In the following pic, I need to pull out the girl.


to give something like this >


What I normally do is select a rough estimation and crop it then try the Image Size and see if it would resize to close enough the required 170 x 255, as you can image this can involve numerous trial and error attempts.



what Im wondering (gets to point finally!) is if theres an easier way to do it? In my head I imagine something where you can create a marquee tool of a set size and move it around the picture until you've got a useable area before locking and then cropping.

(It probably exists in Photoshop already but I cant seem to find it )

Thanks in advance

Peter

[peasepud]

well it just goe4s to show, I really should try searching properly myself first

5 minutes after posting I find the answer by accident, so if anyones interested its as follows:

Select the Rectangular Marquee tool and change the drop down Style to Fixed Aspect Ratio and enter the size required (in my case 170, 255) in the respective boxes et voila a marquee box which will always be in the right ratio.

Now very embarassed at replying to my own first post