When you want to fill a large area with color in a hurry, the Paint Bucket is the tool for you. It’s right below the Brush in the Tools panel if you have two columns of tools, or below the Smart brush if you have one column. If you click it or press its keyboard shortcut (K) and then click in your image, all the available area (either your whole image or the current selection) gets flooded with the current Foreground color. It works something like the Magic Wand: Just as the Magic Wand selects only the color you click, the Paint Bucket fills only the color you click.
Make any Options bar setting adjustments, discussed next, before clicking in your photo with the Paint Bucket.
Most of the Paint Bucket’s Options bar settings are probably familiar:
Pattern. Normally, the Paint Bucket fills the area with the Foreground color, but turn on this checkbox to make it use a pattern instead. Choose an existing pattern from the Pattern drop-down menu in the Options bar, or create your own, just as you would with the Pattern Stamp (The Pattern Stamp).
Mode. You can use the Paint Bucket in any blend mode, as explained later in this chapter (Burning).
Opacity. One hundred percent opacity gives you total coverage: nothing shows through the paint you put down. Lower the percentage for a more transparent effect.
Tolerance. This setting works the same way it does for the Magic Wand (The Magic Wand): The higher the number, the more shades the paint fills.
Anti-alias. This setting smoothes the edges of the fill. Leave it turned on unless you have a specific reason not to.
Contiguous. This is another option that should be familiar from the Magic Wand (The Magic Wand). If you leave this checkbox on, you change only areas of the chosen color that touch each other. Turn it off, and all areas of the color you click get changed, whether they’re contiguous or not.
All Layers. Fills any pixels that meet your criteria (determined by the tool’s other Options bar settings), no matter what layer they’re on. (The Paint Bucket actually paints on the active layer, but with this checkbox turned on, it looks for pixels to change based on all the layers in your image.) To exclude a layer, click that layer’s eye icon in the Layers panel to hide it. Don’t forget that you can lock the transparent and translucent parts of layers in the Layers panel (see Locking Layers).
You can undo a Paint Bucket fill with the usual Ctrl+Z/⌘-Z.