Photoshop Paint Bucket Tool

The paint bucket tool is used to fill an image or a selected area with color, but it can also fill using a pattern that we could create ourselves.

The paint bucket tool is another one that, without a doubt, any user with a minimum of experience will know how to use. I suppose this because any design program has it, even the most basic ones like Paint, which comes with Microsoft Windows.

So, surely few explanations will be necessary to learn how to use the paint can. However, the one we are publishing on .com would not be complete if we left it aside. However, to get the most out of this article, we are going to explain a use of the paint can that perhaps many are unaware of, which is to fill it with a motif. We will see it shortly, although we are going to start by explaining the most basic use of this tool.

The paint bucket sits on the Photoshop toolbar, sharing space on the button panel with the gradient tool. If we see the gradient button, we simply have to do a long click to bring up the paint bucket tool.

fill color

The most common use of the paint bucket tool is to fill with color. To activate it, we simply click on any part of the image and it fills an area of ​​the image with color, which will depend on the layer where we are working and the content it has.

When we use the paint bucket we have to take into account the layer where we are working, since the tool fills in the color on the layer that is selected. The paint bucket fills with color the entire area of ​​the image that is not bounded. Let’s imagine that it is just that, a pot of paint and that we pour the paint over the layer. Then the paint expands, like a liquid, occupying as much area of ​​the image as it can. The limits of the painting will be the ones that have been drawn on the layer. For example, if we have the drawing of a rectangle (which delimits an area by 4 straight lines), and we paint inside that area, the paint will expand throughout the space of the rectangle. The outer areas of the rectangle will not be painted, because the paint will not be able to pass the limits marked by the polygon.

It follows from the last paragraph that if the layer we’re painting on doesn’t have any content, the paint bucket will paint the entire layer. Now, we may want to paint an area that is not marked by the image, without the paint bucket expanding for the entire layer. In that case we can make a selection (with the ) and paint inside. Then the painting will never go beyond the boundaries of the selected area.

Paint Bucket Tool Options

The paint bucket has a few options, like most of the program’s tools, which can be set in the Options panel, usually at the top of the Photoshop window. When we select the tool, the options panel will automatically appear, which looks like this:

Foreground Color: This option is used to select between painting with the foreground color or painting with a pattern (we’ll see later what painting with a pattern means). By default, it paints with the foreground color, which is the one we have selected in the toolbar, in the color selector that appears below. In the following image we mark the place where the foreground color appears with an image:

Mode: This allows several ways to fill in color, but I don’t really find it very useful, except to perform some specific effect.

Opacity: With this option we can paint the selected color, but creating a transparency. In principle it is 100% opaque, so the color of the paint has no transparency. But if we lower the opacity we will see that the color we paint loses a bit of strength in tone and if we have a layer below with some drawing, we will see that it can be seen, because the paint we are using has transparency.

Tolerance: This value is used for the tool to more or less tolerate the limits of the layer where we are painting. At lower tolerance, the limits where we paint will be restricted to areas where there is the same color. This tolerance value is similar to the one we explained in .

Smooth: It is used so that the edges of the area to be painted have a smoothing and the pixel map that is an image is not so noticeable.

Contiguous: This is used so that only the contiguous pixels are filled with color. The default behavior that we have explained (that the painting of the paint bucket stops by the limits of the area that you have drawn where it is being painted) is when the contiguous value is active. If it is not active, the paint bucket will paint on the entire layer, as long as the tolerance allows it.

All layers: If we check it, we will paint on the layer that is selected, but the tolerance will be taken into account with what has been drawn on all layers and not only on the layer where we are working.

paint with a motif

The first of the configuration possibilities in the options panel has a drop-down that allows you to choose between “Foreground Color” and “Motif”. In the case that we select the motif option, it will not be painted with a flat color, but with a certain graphic map, which will make a mosaic, repeating itself as many times as necessary to fill in as much area as possible. The pattern can be anything, such as an image, dither, logo, or whatever.

Photoshop has several output patterns configured for testing, which can be selected in the interface on the right.

We can select any motif and try to paint, to see that a mosaic is made with the motif, instead of painting with a homogeneous color.

Define a custom reason

We can define ourselves the reasons that are needed to make our designs and for this we simply have to make a selection and then select the “Selection / Define reason” menu. Then a small window will appear for us to give the motif a name, with a sample of the image that we have selected and from which the motif will be created.

Then, with the paint bucket, the tool configured with the “Motif” option, we will be able to paint with a mosaic with the motif we just made. For this we will use the paint bucket tool as we had explained in the case of painting with a flat color.

In the previous image we show how we create a motif with the .com logo and in the following image we will see how it would turn out to paint with that motif on a space delimited by a curved area:

If you are interested in this motif, I refer you to the article where we explain a practical case of the use of motifs, in this case for the creation of a background for a web page.

That’s all we wanted to tell you about the paint bucket, which is a very basic and easy-to-use tool, but in Photoshop it has interesting configuration options, which greatly expands its functionality.