Paint bucket tool

The paint bucket tool amounts to the same as ‘make a magic wand selection based on the sampled color and Tolerance setting in the Options bar and fill the selection with the current foreground color or predefined pattern’. In this mode of operation, there is none of the flexibility associated with making a magic wand or Color Range selection and modifying it before filling. You can use the paint bucket to quickly fill the inside areas of a mask or quick mask outline. A Contiguous option is also available for the paint bucket (see the magic wand description) and the All Layers option neatly allows you to fill using a pixel color sample based on all layers. The paint bucket can also be used to fill with patterns as well as with a solid color. To do this, choose the Pattern mode from the Options bar and select the pattern type. The paint bucket tool options are all shown below in Figure 1.

Figure 1 The Paint bucket tool Options bar.

As much as I try to ignore the paint bucket, people keep coming up with ways to prove me wrong. Recently, photographer Stuart Weston showed me how he used the paint bucket tool to add small filled patches of color to a large composite fashion image. The final image was very impressive.

Changing the color of the canvas

If you want to change the color of the canvas, the best way to do this is via the Photoshop Interface preferences. Alternatively, you can still use the paint bucket trick, which is to select a new color in the Color Picker and Shift-click with the paint bucket tool in the canvas area. Be warned that this action cannot be undone using Command+Z/Control+Z! If you do need to restore the original gray canvas color, go to the color picker and enter 192 in the red, green and blue fields to make a new gray foreground color and Shift-click in the canvas area again (or, you can reset thje color via the Photoshop Interface preferences).