PhotoPlus X2 User Guide - Serif

84 Painting and Drawing
Filling a region
Filling regions or layers is an alternative to brushing on colours or patterns.
Making a selection prior to applying a fill, and setting appropriate options, can
spell the difference between a humdrum effect and a spectacular one... so it’s
definitely worthwhile getting to know the wide variety of fill types available in
PhotoPlus.
The Fill Tools flyout on the Tools toolbar includes two tools for filling
regions with colour and/or transparency: Flood Fill and Gradient Fill. In addition,
you can use the Edit>Fill... command to apply either a colour or pattern fill. As
with the paint tools, if there is a selection, the Fill tools only affect pixels within the
selected region. If you’re operating on a shape or text layer, a single fill affects the
interior of the object(s) on the layer.
Flood and pattern fills
The Flood Fill Tool works on Background and standard layers, replacing an
existing colour region with the foreground colour. How large a region is "flooded"
with the fill colour depends on the difference between the colour of the pixel you
initially click and the colour of surrounding pixels.
You can use the Context toolbar to set a tolerance value—how much of a colour
difference the tool looks for. With a low tolerance setting, the tool "gives up easily"
and only fills pixels very close in colour to the one you click (a setting of 0 would
fill only pixels of the same colour; 255 would fill all pixels). As the tolerance
increases, so does the tool's effect on pixels further in colour from the original
pixel, so a larger region is flooded.
When Antialias is checked, the boundary of a colour fill is smoothed; uncheck to
produce a hard edge to the fill boundary.
When checked, Contiguous affects only pixels connected to the clicked pixel;
uncheck to affect in-range pixels throughout the region.
The Context toolbar includes an All Layers option. If checked, the Flood Fill tool
samples pixels on all layers (both shown and hidden) underlying the click point, as
if the layers were merged into one. If unchecked, it only samples pixels on the
active layer. In either case, it only fills pixels on the active layer.