Photoshop – Fill with colour quickly

Photoshop

Back in the day I used PaintShop Pro and I was really comfortable with it. During those years I had a brief fling with Photoshop 7 which left me feeling utterly confused with her seemingly counterintuitive tools.

One of those things I seemed to do really often was fill stuff with the Paint Bucket tool. In PaintShop Pro, this seemed to work as expected and I got so used to the way it works; you just set it to 100% Tolerance to fill the whole layer or selection.

The Paint Bucket tool just doesn’t work that way in Photoshop – in fact it is very similar to the Magic Wand – it just fills with colour the same way it would make a selection. I had some retraining to do if I was going to grow up and move in with Photoshop…

I found out it’s actually quite simple to fill a layer (or selection) with colour in Photoshop – just hold down Ctrl and press Delete to fill with the Background Colour or hold down Alt and press Delete to fill with the Foreground Colour!