Help with marquee selection

[Thomas30369421cjbb]

Hello everyone! I have an issue that's driving me nuts.

I#m using the latest photoshop version.

I have searched everywhere but the guides are eather outdated of miss my problem.

I want to resize the contents of my marquee selection. 

I don't want to resize the selection, but what is being selected.

The free transorm tool always selects the layer and ignores my marquee selection.

How can I fix this? I want to make a box selection. and resize what is inside that selection. 

[Trevor.Dennis]

I am not entirely sure I understand, but I'll try.

If you want to resize what is selected, copy it to a new layer and use Free Transform

If you want to resize the selection, you have several options.

The Contextual Taskbar has options to expand and contract the selection

But you can also Transform the selection, either via the Select menu, or the CTB again

Transforming a selection is especially useful when trying to fit to an ellipse, for instance.

If I am missing thee point, can you describe in more detail please?

[Thomas30369421cjbb]

Hey! Thank you for your reply.

That confusion is why I had trouble to find an answer. 

The selection is fine. It is the content inside the selection I want to resize.

Here's an example of what I'm trying to do. I have multiple layers of different characters. I only want to scale down parts of the body. The problem. If I copy the selection to a new layer, I still have the original body underneath it.

Literally all I want is to make the left character's upper body 2 pixels less in hight.

[Thomas30369421cjbb]

So i just figured out that the problem was that my layers were linked.

By unlinking them I can to the transform operation I want.

However. Since I have multiple layers of characters. Is there a way to do the same operation on all layers at once instead of having to select each layer and repeat the same operation over and over?