Newbie painting/fill questions

[Jman99]

Hey guys (and girls),
I'm new to the forums and PCS5 although I've used Photoshop Elements and GIMP for years. There are a couple very easy things I haven't been able to figure out in CS5 yet, so I keep going back to GIMP at times. I know there has to be a way to do this in Photoshop, but I haven't figured it out yet =). Anyway, here are the two things:

1) When I want to quickly color something to get an idea of what it will look like, I want to just use the paint bucket tool and fill the inked areas without having to select anything beforehand. I can do this easily in GIMP, but in Photoshop it fills the entire layer with color. Is there any way to fix that?

2) When painting, sometimes I want to work at a specific opacity level and I don't want my brush strokes to continue to build up the color as I go over it. In GIMP, using the airbrush tool I can do this, but in Photoshop, even if I have the opacity turned down, it will continue to build up the color with each stroke of the brush. Can I fix that?

Sorry for the easy questions, but hopefully someone has run into the same problems =P Thanks in advance!

 

[jaysuess]

1) I am assuming that you are trying to fill color on an illustration with black illustrated outlines. Here as example of one of my illustrations I did for Disney:



I put the ink layer on top (set to multiply) and the color layer below. Set your Paint Bucket tools to the specs in the image. Set tolerance to 0 and select Anti-Alias, Contiguous and All Layers. Now just click on your paint layer and voila. Note: your ink lines must be solid and closed. Any open spaces will allow the paint to spill out.

2) Don't set the opacity on the brush or air-brush, set the opacity on the layer in the layers palette.

Hope this helps. Cheers!

 

[costisefu]

1) you could use blending options and color overlay, if you want to uniform color the layer.
for isolated fill I don't understand why simply filling doesn't work. maybe you have a too big tolerance or too uniform color, without borders;

2) a brush has two settings: opacity and flow.
You should keep flow to 100%. This way it will not accumulate.
So you will control only the opacity.

 

[jaysuess]

No, costisefu, if you lower the opacity on the brush tool it will still accumulate when you paint over previous lines. Give it a try.

 

[Jman99]

Hey guys,
First off, thanks for the assistance. Yah, even if I lower the opacity but keep flow 100% it continues to accumulate and build up the color. I didn't even think of setting the opacity of the color layer itself =P That was too easy. And I can always put the other colors on a different layer if they will be a different opacity.

Jayseuss, after copying your settings for the bucket fill tool everything worked fine. So it must've been one of the tabs that I hadn't clicked off before that made the difference.

I'm still getting used to the flow setting. It seems similar to opacity in a lot of ways. I'm going to play with that a bit more. Anyway, thanks for your help guys, I appreciate it.

 

[costisefu]

It will acumulate if you use the brush again. Don't lift the finger from the mouse!
So try to use the brush continuous and only once, to have control.

 

[Jman99]

Hey Costisefu,
Yah I noticed that it wouldn't accumulate as long as I didn't lift up my pen/mouse, but there are times when I'd forget or whatever, so I was just thinking it would be nice to remedy it. But no biggy I guess =) Thanks again

--Jason