Technical data

Working with Paint and Text 55
q You’ll have fun with these! Try building up a pile of shapes, each
using a different color with partial transparency so you can see
through to the shapes below. Or just play around with the
adjustable handles to create zany designs or meaningful symbols.
Often, forms like these can communicate quite a lot in a small
space—think about the possibilities for Web buttons or icons.
Lots of possibilities arise using shapes with the fill tool described in the
next section. Because it’s easy to create multiple shapes with subtly
different proportions, shapes lend themselves to animation, too.
(Chapter 6 has a Hands-on example.)
Filling Regions
The Flood Fill Tool replaces an existing color region with the
foreground color. As with the paint tools, if there is a selection, the
Flood Fill tool only affects pixels within the selected region. How large
a region is “flooded” with the fill color depends on the difference
between the color of the pixel you initially click and the color of
surrounding pixels.
You can use the Tool Properties tab to set a tolerance value—how
much of a color difference the tool looks for. With a low tolerance
setting, the tool gives up easily and only fills pixels very close in color
to the one you click (a setting of 0 would fill only pixels of the same
color; 255 would fill all pixels). As the tolerance increases, so does the
tool’s effect on pixels further in color from the original pixel, so a
larger region is flooded.
To apply a flood fill using the foreground color, select the tool from the
toolbar, and set tolerance and layer fill options. Then just click with the
tool where you want to start the flood!
q Try flood-filling some existing color regions in your image.
Working with Text
Use the Text Tools flyout on the Tools toolbar to select from two text
tools—one for entering solid, colorful text on a new layer, and the other
for creating a selection in the shape of text with which to manipulate
content on an existing layer.
To create new solid text, choose the standard Text tool from the
flyout. Click with the tool where you want to insert text (it can be
moved later). The Add Text window opens.