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The Paint Bucket Tool


J

JoeJ

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Have been trying to re-paint the background of a photo with the paint bucket tool, but I ran into a problem as the paint bucket would only work on a section of the picture..
Why did it stop working when I tried to repaint the rest of the picture ?

The original colour of the section I was re-painting was quite uniform, I was not trying to re-paint parts that were painted in contrasting colours.

I use Windows 8.1, Firefox, and Photoshop CS6.

Thank you for any help you can give me.

Joseph
 
The paint bucket tool will either fill in an area that you had previously selected, aka, "a selection", or, if nothing is selected, it will "pour" paint over the entire image or layer. My guess is that the reason it wouldn't fill in the other parts of your picture is because they probably weren't included in a selection you had previously made, or the layer you were working on didn't include those areas.

That being said, the paint bucket tool is a fairly crude tool in that it puts down perfectly uniform coats of color that look completely unrealistic in photo applications. If you use it to quickly fill in an area, follow it up with use of some other tool (eg, the paint brush, cloning, burn and dodge, etc.) to vary the color it laid down.

HTH,

Tom M
 
peta62 said:
I think it will pour only until a color change, not over entire layer. But my guess would be you still have a selection.
Click to expand...
Good point. It could stop at a boundary if the tolerance was accidentally or intentionally set to a small value (other than the default value, 255). I hardly ever use this option because it doesn't afford the flexibility of real selections, but perhaps it got accidentally set.

If the OP returns and tells us that none of the above suggestions seem applicable, another possibility is that his preferences file got corrupted and needs to be deleted and then automatically rebuilt. This is done by holding down alt, shift, and control while starting PS.

Tom M
 
Tom Mann - thanks Tom. I did not know it has to be set. My bucket tool ( PS CC 2015 ) stops on color border and I do not remember changing it, I even think older versions did for me too.
 
peta62 said:
@Tom Mann - thanks Tom. I did not know it has to be set. My bucket tool ( PS CC 2015 ) stops on color border and I do not remember changing it, I even think older versions did for me too.
Click to expand...
Interesting -- mine has never done this. BTW, I only have CC2014 and 2015 on my machine, and I double checked the behavior of the paint bucket tool in both. It filled the entire layer unless I reduced the threshold. It didn't matter which of the other option check boxes I had checked. Interesting.

Thanks,

Tom M
 
My screen, I have used picture from here, you can see the version and Paint Bucket setup too. I am wondering whether setup of something else ( like Select Color Range for example ) could change this setting.

PaintBucket.jpg
 
Tom Mann - of course, this conversation does not pay our bills, I have to go to the office too. Although it is very interesting, it is not urgent.
Best regards,
Peter
 
Many thanks to all those who have just helped me with the problem of the Paint Bucket Tool. YOU HAVE SOLVED MY PROBLEM.

I find, from the several replies you sent me that the best way is to use selections, adjustment of the threshold setting, and the healing brush tool, for improving my photos.

You help has been greatly appreciated. MANY THANKS AGAIN IN MY NATIVE LANGUAGE, IL-MALTI, THIS TIME:- GRAZZI HAFNA

JoeJ (or Joseph)
 
peta62 said:
I think it will pour only until a color change, not over entire layer.

But my guess would be you still have a selection.
Click to expand...

In CS6, it will only pour until it reaches a change in color on the same layer no matter where the tolerance is set.
 
OK, guys - I think I understand the behavior of this tool (and its settings) a bit better, at least in PS CC 2014.

First, I made a test target that consisted of one layer with lots of very thin vertical color bars of many different hues, saturation levels, and luminosities. This provided lots of contrast in these three variables. This area was essentially a sharpened noise gradient map.

I also added 4 thicker bars of uniform color to make it easy to reproducibly land on any one of them: black, 50% gray, white, and a mid-pink.

01
test_image-ps01a-01_before.jpg


Next, I set the foreground color to black, and tested the paint bucket tool's behavior with its tolerance set to 255. Whenever I started the flooding process by clicking on one of the thick grayscale bars, it flooded everything in the image.

02
test_image-ps01a-02_starting_on_any_grayscale_bar.jpg


However, if I clicked on the thick pink bar or any of the thin bars with some other color, it flooded almost everything with black, but left a few thin bars untouched (as Pete, Sam and the OP observed).

03
test_image-ps01a-03_after_flooding_starting_on_color.jpg


At tolerance=255, a second click in the same area (now black) would finish the process and flood everything with black.

At tolerance=255, the first click on a weakly saturated area would flood more of the image, ie, it started to behave more like clicking on one of the grayscale bars.

As expected,at lower tolerance settings, the first click on a non-grayscale area would flood less of the image.

So, I suspect that the reason for the difference our initial perceptions was because we probably were testing it on different images, starting the tool on areas of different levels of saturation, etc.

I guess this is just one more complexity of PS we will just have to keep in the back of our heads. :bangdesk:

Cheers,

Tom M
 
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