In this basic tutorial we will look at the two main methods for quickly filling a Layer or a selection in Krita. We will also see how to change the shortcuts for filling the entire selection, so you can use a key combination that is easier to remember, and we will briefly review the options and modes of the Fill tool.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! In this basic tutorial we will look at the two main methods for quickly filling a Layer or a selection in Krita. We will also see how to change the shortcuts for filling the entire selection, so you can use a key combination that is easier to remember, and we will briefly review the options and modes of the Fill tool.
In Krita, the main fill methods are the Fill tool, whose icon is a bucket, and filling the entire selection, whose shortcut is the key combination SHIFT and Backspace. In both cases, by default the Foreground Color is used for filling, but there are some important differences.
Filling the entire selection does not provide particular modes, because its purpose is simply to quickly fill the entire selection uniformly, without specific options. If there is no selection in the current Layer, then the entire Layer is filled uniformly with the Foreground Color.
However, if there is a selection, the entire selection is filled. The interesting thing is that a multiple selection is also filled completely, meaning all selected areas are filled at once. The Fill tool also allows this type of filling, as we will see, but with SHIFT and Backspace there is no need to change the current tool to do it.
The quick fill of the entire selection with SHIFT and Backspace also has another mode that allows you to fill everything with the Background Color. The shortcut for this mode is the Backspace key. Of course, each time I am undoing the changes with CTRL Z.
Now let us examine the Fill tool, whose fill options appear in the Tool Options docker after selecting the tool. At the top we immediately find the Fill Mode section, and the first option is Fill Active Selection Or The Entire Canvas, which therefore replicates the SHIFT and Backspace shortcut. The mode selected by default is usually the second one, which is Fill Contiguous Region.
The Fill tool allows us to fill areas with similar colors, with a tolerance defined by the Threshold parameter. I will show this by deselecting everything and clicking on a point of the tie with a low Threshold value, such as 10. In this case, we correctly fill only areas with similar colors, but it is enough to increase the Threshold to about 60 to fill the entire tie.
Another way to fill the entire tie, or more generally areas with different colors but enclosed by another color, such as black in the case of the tie edges, is Fill All Regions Until A Specific Boundary Color. In this case, we can use the color selector to make sure we select the correct color for the boundary of the area. The Threshold value will refer, this time, to the tolerance in selecting the boundary color.
Speaking of fill colors, the Fill tool also allows you to choose whether to fill with the Foreground Color or the Background Color through the icons in the Fill Source section. In this section we also find the Pattern option, which allows you to fill the area by repeating an image called a Pattern, which can be selected using the Fill Patterns tool that I am showing on screen. I will probably dedicate another tutorial to Patterns, which can also be customized.
Let us return to the Foreground Color fill mode, with a lower Threshold, to talk about two Fill options that allow you to leave a more or less soft edge in the filled area. Actually, the first option, called Grow, also allows the fill to expand beyond the normal boundary. By setting a positive or negative value for this parameter, the fill will respectively expand beyond or shrink inside the normal fill area by a certain number of pixels.
The Feather option instead allows us to soften the edges of the filled area. In this case as well, the strength of the effect is expressed in pixels through the appropriate field. For reference, to type values directly into these fields, as I am doing, you need to right click on them. You can also change the values by rotating the mouse wheel over the fields.
Both the quick fill of the entire selection and the Fill tool allow us to make the selection transparent simply by activating the Eraser mode before using the tools. In the example there is only one Layer, so by using Eraser mode on the selection we will see the typical checkerboard pattern that indicates that portion of the image is completely transparent.
The quick fill of the entire selection is a very convenient tool, but the same cannot be said for its two shortcuts, which are Backspace for filling with the Background Color and SHIFT and Backspace for filling with the Foreground Color. The Fill tool instead has a more intuitive shortcut, which is the F key, the initial of Fill. It may therefore be more useful to set, for example, SHIFT F for quick fill with the Foreground Color and CTRL F for quick fill with the Background Color.
To perform these operations, open the Configure Krita window from the Settings menu, then open the Keyboard Shortcuts tab and type Fill in the search field to quickly find the tools we are interested in.
In the Menu section, click on Backspace and replace this shortcut with CTRL F. Then replace the SHIFT and Backspace shortcut with the SHIFT F shortcut.
In this way, the F shortcut will immediately come to mind when you think about the Fill tool. After that, you only need to remember that its special one step fill mode is SHIFT F, and that the alternative mode, which fills with the Background Color, is CTRL F. Of course, these are only my preferences, so feel free to set the shortcuts you prefer.
That is all for this video as well! As with my other videos, the text version of this tutorial and other resources are available on my website at the link you can find in the description. If this video was helpful, you can thank me with a Like and by subscribing to the channel. See you soon!