Painting
Tools- Intro & Paint Bucket
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
The Paint Bucket
The Paint Bucket is the simplest of the painting tools. It used to fill areas
with solid color or patterns. The paint bucket tool works much like the magic
wand selection tool in that it fills with color based on color similarity as
determined by the tolerance setting you choose in the tool settings. In
Photoshop 5.x, the shortcut key for the paint bucket is K. In Photoshop
6, this tool shares a toolbox space with the gradient tool and the shortcut key
was changed to G. Shift-G switches between the paint bucket and
the gradient tool in Photoshop 6.
 Take
a look at the Paint Bucket options now by double clicking on its toolbox button,
or in Photoshop 6, by selecting the tool. Notice that the paint bucket has a
blending mode menu and opacity control, just like the layers palette. These
allow you to change the way the paint blends with the pixels you are painting on
the same layer. This is somewhat different from the layer blend modes because
the layer blend modes change how the pixels blend with all underlying layers,
and the paint blend modes change how the pixels blend with existing pixels in
the same layer. We'll explore the blending modes a little later when we get to
the practice exercises. I also want to point out that there are two extra blend
modes that are only available with some of the painting tools: behind and clear.
- Painting in behind
mode gives results similar to what you would get if you painted on a layer
below another layer, but instead your paint is applied to the same layer.
Where the existing pixels are not completely opaque, your new paint will
mingle with it; where it is fully transparent, the new paint will show
through; and where it is fully opaque, the new paint will not appear at all.
You can try this by scribbling some paint on a layer, then filling that
layer in behind mode with the paint bucket.
- Clear is only
available on layers other than the background. It allows you to use the
Paint Bucket or Line tool to erase pixels to transparency.
The tolerance setting in
the paint bucket options works just like the tolerance setting of the magic wand
and allows you to control the similarity of the color that is replaced when you
click with the Paint Bucket.
Anti-alias smoothes the
edges of the fill color slightly.
The contents menu
(Photoshop 5.x) or source menu (Photoshop 6) lets you choose between the
foreground color and a pattern fill. In Photoshop 5.x, the pattern option will
be unavailable until you define a pattern. In Photoshop 6, when pattern is
selected, the available patterns will appear as a menu on the options bar. We'll
talk more about pattern fills later.
The Use All Layers
checkbox allows you to fill a layer other than the one you are sampling.
The Contiguous option (in
Photoshop 5.5 and later only) controls whether the fill is applied to adjacent
areas only. When unchecked, the fill will be applied to all areas in the image
that match the tolerance setting. When checked, it only fills adjacent pixels
that match the tolerance setting.
Fill Command
 More
than likely, you will find yourself using the paint bucket very little, so I
don't want to spend a lot of time on it. I tend to use the Edit > Fill command
and the foreground/background fill shortcut keys more often. With the Fill
command you can choose from the foreground or background color, a pattern, the
active history state, black, 50% gray, and white. You also have opacity controls
and the same blend mode options.
Continue on to the next
page to learn about Gradient and Pattern Fills.
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