Yes they screwed this up in some way, there’s something wrong with ‘Select All’ selections now. Even if you go into Quick mask (Q) and choose the Maximum filter this doesn’t work either. There’s no logical reason for this, because it did in all previous versions going back to 5 or so.
The only work around is to go into quick mask and then into free transform. Then you can nudge the w and H values down one.
Mark,
I’m glad I’m not the only one. The other thing you can do is refine the selection and zero out everything except for contract percentage, but obviously this does not get you a fixed number of pixels. I ended up nudging my selection 1 pixel and cropping, doing it 4X to cover all 4 directions.
Paul
I created an action that selects all, makes new layer, fills, sets stroke to 1 pix, inside, then insert menu item layer style stroke, then sets fill to 0, then creates new layer, then moves layer down (arrange), then selects previous layer (must be entered as key command option bracket right), then merges down, then selects transparency, then selects inverse, the deletes current layer. Now you have an action that does modify. The two layer styles inputs are there so you first let the action set the stroke to 1, but more importantly, inside. Then the insert menu item version lets you input a value just like the modify dialog. If you use all relative action inputs (not "select layer 1" but "select previous layer") you can run the action from any doc state.
It looks like the two layer style adjustments are probably only useful if you were going to create another action for expand (but considering you can’t use this "method" on a select-all for expand anyway…). You could have two in a row with the first to be the "default value" where you might adjust it, but might want it set to something other than three for quick no-entry-entering… Either way, I don’t think you ever want the insert menu item layer style in your action as that (in CS3) seems to cancel out the previous layer style attributes (??).
That’s a better workaround than I came up with because it does precise pixels, would need to be actioned though.
Yes, the idea is you button/key command the action and it presents one dialog box, which is the pixel amount you’d like to contract. Hit enter and you have your contracted selection.
