Why is the paint bucket tool so inept?

[Richard1967L]

Hello,

Surely the paint bucket tool is inept. Why are you not given a choice, in the option pane, of how the bucket fill operates? As you are aware a lot of the time it doesn't fill completely, hitting another colour and then not operating properly as anti-aliasing stops the bucket from filling. This is not always wanted and surely you could be given a choice over whether the antialiasing is merged with the new fill colour or not.

Adobe could change and make this tool work differently for a lot of its use.

Do you agree?

Richard

[Chuck Uebele]

The paint bucket tool is a very old tool and hasn't been updated. I doubt that it ever will be. There are more refined ways to make a selection and fill it than the paint bucket.

[Barbara Ash · Accepted solution]

This is what's happening. In the Options bar, the Paint Bucket tool has a Tolerance setting from zero to 255. If you set it to 255 it will fill the whole image with the Foreground color. If you set it to zero, it won't fill at all. The default is 32 which is probably what you're using and it partically fills, depending on how similar the pixels are in the area that you click.

I hope this helps to understand how the tool works.

When I want to fill an area, I select it first with one of the selection tool, then use the keyboard short cut Ctrl-Backspace to fill with the background color or Shift-Backspace to fill with the foreground color.

[Daoyi5FE2]

Completely agreed. What bugs me about at lot of the "professionals" attitude is that their recommended solutions are often just extra steps for doing something that should be incredibly simple. Even MS Paint's paint bucket is better than photoshops. I use photoshop to animate in 2D, and I really don't have time to be fiddling with multiple layers and selection expanding.

Even if there are more refined ways to do something, that doesn't excuse a fundamentally broken tool. Adobe needs to either update the tool to actually just work the way any typical user expects it to work, or remove it entirely. The tolerance doesn't work either in most cases, and clicking twice for some reason then OVER draws.

At the very least why is there no "expand by n pixels" option, since that's how "more refined" users basically do it?

[Daoyi5FE2]

In any case, while it doesn't excuse the fact that paint bucket is inept, the best workaround I could find is to select the area you want filled with magic wand, record an action of expanding selection by 2 pixels, and hooking that to a hotkey which basically becomes your replacement for paint bucket. Still means 2 steps instead of 1, which means this is a WORKAROUND, not some "professional, better method" or whatever nonsense.

[davescm]

If you know what you want from a change in the tool, then raise a feature request where Adobe developers will see it:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family

Dave

[Daoyi5FE2]

Thanks, have done so