How to Use the Paint Bucket Tool in Adobe Photoshop

Use the paint bucket tool in Adobe Photoshop to fill in any area with a solid color or pattern. You can fill a shape, background or any other object quickly and easily this way. Using the paint bucket is simple, and you can change the settings of the paint bucket tool to get the look that you want.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Adobe Photoshop

1. Open an existing Photoshop file or start a new file. Click on the paint bucket tool in your Photoshop toolbox. It is a picture of a paint can tipping over.

2. Choose a fill color by clicking the color picker and selecting the color you would like to use for your paint bucket. The color picker is the two squares overlapping each other – be sure to click on the top square.

3. Use the paint bucket tool options palette at the top of the screen to change the paint bucket to fill the foreground or background of the object you are going to fill with paint.

4. Use the "Mode" option on the options palette to select what effect you want your paint bucket tool to have.

5. Change the "Opacity" option on the options palette to change the opacity of your paint. Decreasing the opacity of your paint will make your brush more transparent, while increasing the opacity will make it less transparent.

6. Set the remaining options on the options palette such as tolerance, anti-alias, contiguous and all layers. Tolerance controls the amount of shades used by the paint bucket. Check the anti-alias box to smooth the edges of your fill, the contiguous box to fill adjacent pixels based on your tolerance setting and the all layers box to fill a different layer.

7. Click on your background or inside of an object to fill it with paint.

Tips & Warnings

• The higher the tolerance, the more shades that will be filled with the paint bucket. The lower the tolerance, the fewer shades that will be filled.
• Shift-G switches between the paint bucket tool and the gradient tool.