Why does the paint bucket tool leave a bloody white unfilled line around my art. This is, very, annoying, and yall should fix it. -sincerly Weenie

White outlines while filling areas of your art are generally caused by anti-aliased line art. 

And no matter the drawing software used, it will almost always require manual clean-up. 

If your art is meant for print at a high resolution it is considered best to convert the lines to pure black using (for example) a simple conversion to 1bit using a contrast filter. Then remove the white and turn it to transparency. Next, add layers for colouring under the lines art layer, and start colouring.

If your art software is any good, its fill tool should have at a minimum an overfill or grow option that ensures that the fill reaches under the black lines. 

Attempting to fill anti-aliased lines is more difficult to do properly. Even fill tools that are designed with digital painters / illustrators in mind still have trouble with this, and more often than not it requires manual intervention.

For example.

Clip Studio Paint:

PhotoLine has a neat vector fill option, but also struggles with the fill layer overlaid on top of the line art. It looks okay, but not great:

Of all fill tools, Krita does an acceptable job (it does have the most feature-rich fill tool for this type of job), but still requires manual cleanup:

That is why comic artists and illustrators (including myself) convert the anti-aliased line work to aliased 1bit ones before colouring:

The threshold adjustment will only work on a non-transparent background, btw.

Now it becomes possible to add colour fill layers under the line art and it is becomes easy to create fills that no longer produce visual outlines:

This works really well for high resolution print output. But also for web or screen output, since we can always scale down - and when we do so the final screen version will have beautiful anti-aliased lines.

This means your art should be drawn on a high resolution canvas, even if you intend it to be prepared for lower resolution art (web, etc.) later. Ideally at a minimum of [required print size] x 600 - 800dpi.

Then when it is time to create a digital screen version: scale down the final art to the required screen size. When we do so, the 1bit black line art will be anti-aliased and look just fine for screen work as well:

Anyway, this is more about the HOW and one's PROCESS rather than fixing any particular tool. There is a good workflow how to go about this, and a bad workflow.

Now, having said all that: Photoshop's fill tool really would benefit from a small update. At the very least a grow or overfill option would be very welcome. For inspiration, check how Krita’s fill tools are implemented. I avoid Photoshop for this type of work myself, to be honest, due to the archaic nature of the fill tool.

Cheers!

Hi ​@GenesgottaPeenz , 

I assume that you have some small gradient from where you line is fading from black (or whatever color) to the page color/background. You can adjust your digital brushes to help create harder lines,  and also adjusting the tolerance setting. The paint bucket tool will apply more consistently. 

If you are scanning in your art. You can adjust your contrast of your scan to help create that harder edge or get it traced for a vector output. There are good youtube tutorials for this kind of stuff.

Let us know if any of that helps and feel free to send a pic of what your describing to make sure we are on the same pages as you in terms of offering solutions. 

​@D Fosse - I’m afraid I’m still a user who has many niche uses for the paint bucket and magic wand tool and it provides the fastest workflow for me for things like architectural map editing. I need them till I retire at least. 😂

Aside from the limitations of the tool ​@D Fosse already elaborated on the settings you use might make a difference, what are they (see Options Bar)?