Pouring with the Paint Bucket Tool in Photoshop

The Paint Bucket tool, available from the Tools palette, operates much like a combination of the Brush tool and the Magic Wand tool, as you’ll see from looking over its options. To use it, select the tool (press Shift+G until it’s active) and click inside the selection you want to fill. Here are your options, all of which are found on the Options bar:

- Fill: You can choose whether to fill with a solid Foreground color or a pattern.
- Pattern: When you’ve chosen Pattern from the Fill list in the Options bar, you can select a preset pattern, load patterns from your pattern libraries, or create a pattern of your own.
- Mode: You can select a blending mode, too.
- Opacity: Adjust this value to make your fill semitransparent.
- Tolerance: Like the Magic Wand tool, you can choose a tolerance level that specifies how similar in brightness a pixel must be before it is selected for painting.
- Anti-aliased: Choose this option to blend the paint in smoothly with the areas not filled.
- Contiguous: When selected, the paint fills only pixels that are touching. When deselected, paint fills all pixels within the brightness tolerance you specify.
- All Layers: This option applies paint to pixels in all layers that are within the selection
and brightness/tolerance levels you specify.

As with other tools that fill, you can prevent the Paint Bucket tool from filling the transparent pixels. Just select the Transparency icon in the Lock area of the Layers palette.