Not "crop" - use the rectangular marquee tool to make the selection shown above as an orange box, then hit Ctrl+J (not Edit>Crop which is what I think you did before if I read that right) and your selection should now be on a new layer by itself (look at your layer stack - if you don't have one, click Window>Layers and click on the topmost layer to make it active). The object/selection won't still be "selected" (you won't see the little dotted lines anymore) - this is fine as it's not needed to transform it. I think that was your confusion at this point. Now (don't click anything else in the layer stack - the new layer should be automatically selected) hit Ctrl+T (or Edit>Free Transform), and your object should then have the bounding box you see in the lower example - THAT is when you click on the little side boxes (one at a time) and drag horizontally outward. Drag both sides outside of the viewable area (like shown above) because you will see that the "stretch" will not make the edges sharp - pixel edges will be blurred at the sides and you'll particularly see this on the left side. Now, when I mention make another layer above it, and make it "Soft Light" or "Overlay" - look in your layer stack. The upper left corner has a section that should say "Normal" and have a turndown arrow. It is THERE that you can change the layer properties as to how it affects layers below - I read that you were having trouble there in another thread, so I thought I'd clear it up for you here. Hope that helps- -Lew ;-)