Single operation to crop/resize to fit to specific size

Question

I have some images that I'd like to resize to a specific size by cropping and resizing. I've tried using Paint.NET, but the resize and crop are both individual operations. How I'd like it to proceed is as follows. I type in the size that I am trying to resize to. I then get given a box with the right aspect ratio, I can resize the box and move it around. When I'm happy, I click a button and the image is cropped to the selected region and then resized to the aspect ratio I originally entered. Are there any lightweight programs that handle this workflow?

Answer 1

This can easily be done in Photoshop, using the crop tool (C) you can insert a width and height or a proportion in the toolbar and crop an image with that proportion so you dont lose any quality.

Then you just save the image as any format you want, very easy and very fast only one step and if you want the all the have the same proportion the properties used for the first image will stay there so it would be even faster.

Another great thing in Photoshop is the scripts (Actions), if this was to be done to a large amount of images or maybe its something you do everyday you could automate it with scripts, here is a link to a simple guide: http://blog.epicedits.com/2008/03/07/how-to-create-photoshop-actions/

Hope this helped.