Photoshop CS For Dummies

The Paint Bucket tool is part selection tool and part fill tool. The Paint Bucket tool (which looks like a tilted bucket of paint) shares a flyout menu with the Gradient tool and lets you fill an area of continuous color by clicking on the area.

In Figure 13-2, for example, I set the Foreground to white and clicked with the Paint Bucket tool on the row of broccoli in the jar. Photoshop filled the broccoli with white, turning it into the rough facsimile of cauliflower.

Figure 13-2: The Paint Bucket fills a continuous area of color with a different color.

To adjust the performance of the Paint Bucket tool, access the Options bar, shown in Figure 13-3. If you’ve used the Magic Wand tool, you’ll know that the Tolerance value determines how many pixels are affected. With the Paint Bucket tool, the Tolerance setting works the same way. The only difference is that the Paint Bucket applies color instead of selecting pixels like the Magic Wand. You also can select the Anti-aliased check box to soften the edges of the filled area. (In Figure 13-3, the Tolerance value is 32, and Anti-aliased is selected, as it is by default.)

Figure 13-3: The Options bar lets you set fill, blending mode, opacity, and tolerance.