Filling and Stroking in Photoshop

Photoshop offers several different ways to create objects (shapes) out of pixels, and filling and stroking are two of the most venerable object-builders at your disposal. You can also paint objects on your canvas by hand, or convert vector shapes to pixels. But if you need pixels arranged into regular circles, ellipses, and polygons, the Fill and Stroke facilities of Photoshop should be your first stop.

Photoshop creates these pixel objects by filling selections or closed paths with color or patterns, or by tracing the outlines of the selections or paths. Those coming to Photoshop from some other image editors may be confused at first, looking for separate tools to create, say, rectangles and filled rectangles when they want to build a shape filled with pixels. The Shape tool, which creates vector outline objects rather than pixel shapes, isn’t quite what they are looking for.

You can thank Adobe for not overloading the crowded Tools palette with separate tools you don’t really need. When you realize that you can simply make a selection of any shape and then fill it or stroke it, you’ll never miss separate pixel-object tools.

Filling a Selection with the Foreground or Background Color
The following steps show you the basics of filling a selection with either the foreground or background color :
1. Create your selection on a layer.
See the sidebar, “Knowing your selection options,” for help with selections.
2. Choose a fill color as the foreground or background color.
Choose Window➪Color. Use the color sliders to mix your desired color.
3. Choose Edit➪Fill.
The Fill dialog box, appears. Here, you can select whether to fill with the foreground or background color. You also can choose color, black, 50 percent gray, white, history, or pattern.
4. Click OK.
The foreground (or background) color fills the selection. You can also choose a blend mode, the opacity of the fill, and whether to fill the entire selection or only portions of the selection that contain pixels (the nontransparent areas). I recommend not adjusting your blend mode and opacity in the Fill dialog box, but instead adjusting those settings in the Layers palette, where you have more flexibility.

Knowing your selection options
The first step to filling a selection is to make a selection. You can Draw a freehand selection with the Lasso, Polygonal Lasso, or Magnetic Lasso tool.
- Drag a selection with the Rectangular or Elliptical Marquee tools.
- Select pixels by using the Magic Wand.
- Paint a selection by using Quick Mask mode.
- Change a path into a selection.
- Use the Type Mask tools to create selections shaped like text.