Photoshop CS6 crop tool and presets

Hi guys

I have been on Photoshop CS3 until now, and we are slowly thinking, if we should finally move on and upgrade to CS6 (as long as we still don't need to pay full price, as it will be case when CS7 will come out). I'm playing with CS6 trial now for few days, and to be honest I don't see all that much of new things (for this what we need it), except that they finally solved crop&rotate bug, which was going on for some 15 years or so.
But exactly with crop tool, I have some issues. When working on deadline, I don't wish to fiddle with mouse, picking and setting one thing or the other. With old CS3 crop tool, I had chance to have crop tool set to images to 3500px on width, and whatever it is on height, and when I wanted to crop photo vertical, I just pressed "arrow" and preset changed from width to height. Now, I don't find any way to do this. Sure I can set one preset, to have 3500pix on width, and another preset to have 3500pix on height. But it's just too slow to pick desired preset, and I have no idea how to assign keyboard shortcut to do this (on Mac OSX)
Did anyone find way to do this, or have any idea how to get this functionality back? Because this is important enough for me, to say "well I'm not upgrading!".

Thanks for help

Press x to switch.

Nope doesn't work. Crop switches from landscape to vertical, but photo is still cropped with 3500pix on width and whatever it is on height.

It's been a while since I've used CS3 and no longer have it installed anywhere. Does CS3 let you enter only one dimension in the crop box size and save as a preset? So, you have 3500 pixels in the width, nothing in the height, and when you press the arrow key it changes to 3500 for the height? Just trying to figure out how you've got it set up.

In CS3 I have option for crop tool like this:

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primoz wrote in post #14958415
I hope I explained good enough, that you will understand what I want, since my English is far from great

Your English is fine. I just wanted to clarify since it's been a while since I've used CS3. I can't get it to work either by putting a value into only width or height, but does with values in both. You might post this over at the Adobe PS forum - http://forums.adobe.co​m/community/photoshop.

CS6 offers some nice improvements over CS3 especially in ACR.

CS5 shows the arrows with the crop tool, does CS6 not show them?

Thanks for this advice. Will try also over there
I agree CS6 has many improvements (ACR is not something I would care about, considering I maybe shoot 100 photos a year in raw), so now I need to find out, if this issue can be solved, while for others it's not such a big deal, that upgrade would be really worth. But then again $200/shooter is not much, especially considering waiting for CS7, would mean full price, which is a bit different story then

Tony looks like this thing changed in CS6 completely.

I'll preface this by stating I'm a raw shooter and most of my cropping is done in ACR.

But this is how I would handle your cropping stuff for a 1 click fix ...

In your situation I would crop using whatever crop ratio you normally do

and then set up an action to size the image to your dimensions eg. 3500 pixels

and then add a save (and / or save as) to your action,

I might also add a direction to the action to add your copyright / metadata template info for the save.

---------------

your workflow would be as usual for the crop then with a shortcut assigned to a function key for the 3500 resizing action is just one keystroke. Depending upon the speed of your laptop the action should run and finish immediately.

To Record the Action it would look something like this

++from the "File" pull down menu go to the "File Info" - here you'll point to whatever metadata template you have set up for the assignment.

++from the "File" pull down menu go to the "Automate" then "Fit Image" - in the "Fit Image" box you'll enter your dimensions (eg. 3500 pixels for each box, I would suggest your also check do not enlarge)

++next part of the action you can add a save / save as etc for your new JPEG.

++then you'll want to add a close to the file.

++next part of the action assign this action to a function key and you'll be all set. When you double click on the action it should bring up a box where you can assign the action to a function key.

Not quite as fast maybe, but either hit Cmd+Opt+i (image size) and enter 3500px in there, or use "Fit image" set to 3500x3500 maybe?
The last can be set in an action or when batching via Image Processor.

Edit: Ah, I see Palladium already mentioned Fit Image