when using the free select tool how do you have it be curved instead of sharp edges?

I'm not sure if you are talking about smoother edges or sharp points. Sharp points can be eliminated by drawing without making sharp points.

Smoother edges: Draw selection with Free Select tool. Then:

1. Select > To Path
2. Unselect
3. Select > From Path
4. Delete

Do you mean just like drawing with a pencil type - smooth closed shapes?

Just keep your mouse button down and drag to create your shape.
Release the mouse when your finished.
If you want to create a closed shape with say one sharp edge-
Release the mouse button when you want to start the sharp corner, and click to the next point or points.
To go back to drawing roundish shape - from last sharp corner point drag your mouse with the button down again.

To create just a line with curves, use the paths tool. (non closed shape)

Always can use the quick mask button and smudge where needed. Also, you can select the feather option and try playing with that setting (I like doing that quite often to reduce aliasing; I use to use O's technique which is still good, but now I use the feathering technique). As a side note, the quick mask method can be used for all kinds of effects (such as blur and stuff). You can actually apply some filters (not many but still fun) when in this mode since the quick mask is treated like a greyscale bitmap.

Or do they mean rounded corners on the rectangle select? This seems like such a lame way to communicate sometimes.

sorry for not being articulate, it was late at night LOL. I think holding down the mouse button instead of just clicking it is the first step to what I need. now I need to know how to make the line less jagged because I am going to be printing it out and cutting it out with scissors. without too much antialiasing.

I held down the mouse button when I made the selection up there in the blue image. Unfortunately, to have no jags you are going to need antialiasing. I don't know how to make it have smoothness and no antialiasing.

Still not 100% sure what you are asking us. If you choose the arbitrary selection tool, you can also click and then hold the shift key and continue to click around the object to get staightline selection segments too.

You can add a slight feather to your selection, too. But if accuracy counts in this case, the feathering will have an effect on that. It works great for softening harsh edges (jaggedness).

A simple way to smooth rough selections is using "Select->Distort...". With a Spread value of zero, the Smooth parameter will determine how much the edges of your selection will be "rounded" (the Granularity option has less of an effect when the Spread is zero, but can matter for large images).

This is roughly equivalent to feathering the selection (with the Smooth parameter specifying the amount of feathering), sharpening the selection, and then feathering the selection by "1".

Nice idea Saul, thanks!
I wonder why this was never added to the free select tool?
A line smoothing option.

That would be a real handy value setting.

Interesting Saul; never really played with the distort selection options much unless I wanted the selection to be distorted. Your idea does a pretty good job of cleaning up very noisy selections too without edge blur.

thanks everyone turns out I did need antialiasing so feather edges worked for that. I have this part of the image though with an inconsistent edge, what can I do to fix this edge and make it consistently blurry?

You can do this with the free select tool, three edges at a time and then Filters/Blur/Gaussian Blur.
Then set your blur values where you want them and click ok.
Select the last edge with free select, Filters/Repeat Gaussian blur.
Select/None.

There are other ways but this is the simplest way i believe.