Tuesday
Dec202011
Paint Bucket: How to Avoid a Messy Edge
Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 8:13AM
This video is for the age-old problem of 'yucky edges' with the paint bucket. If you want to know the more accurate technique I reference in the end of this video, you'll want to watch these two videos as well. Pen tool selections pt.1, Pen tool selections pt. 2. Enjoy!
Reader Comments (12)
Matt, please don't ever apologize for providing information. You did a great job with this, and as a newbie, I learned something.
Funny, what made this change of mind?
From Composition to very basic?
Got so many requests?
But it's ok, well... it's good you do even tutorials on this level :)
Eludor,
Thanks! I never planned to do all of the composition videos in a row -- I like to mix it up a bit. The composition series will end up at nearly 10 videos, so I don't want to tire out the audience. Don't worry, in January you'll see some more :)
Thanks for the video!
I remember having those kind of troubles before so I think it's good you make tutorials for all - beginners and advanced.
By the way - when will you release Custom Brushes?
Your tutorials were all great so far. I can't wait to buy it and see it. :)
Besides, I want to do some speedpainting in the near future and some custom brushes would certainly help. ;)
I do this same inverse selection -> fill technique. I just want to add that the lock transparency layer option is a great way to continue coloring while not having to worry about staying within the lines. This allows some fairly broad strokes when blocking in.
I really wish I had found a tutorial like this years ago, this was one of my main issues when first starting and it took me a while to figure out.
A technique I usually use is on a layer below the line art, I paint over the lines not caring about keeping it in the line art, when everything is filled, I then use the wand tool to select everything outside of the line art, then I go to select -> expand and make it expand 1 to 2 pixels depending on your compostion size, and then just press delete on the color layer, and it will remove everything thats outside the lines.
Keep up the tutorials Matt
Interesting, the official shortcut for selecting the inverse of a selection is crtl+shift+q.
I've been using crtl+shift+i which seems to do the exact same thing... just a quick observation. :)
When I'm doing this kind of job I'm first setting the color blend of the bucket to DARKEN - this way when I fill the form and the color touches the line art it never goes over it. This is in a case the lines are black. The Darken leaves all dark colors untouched and will never "eat" bits of the line except if the line itself is not brighter than the color you fill.
Most importantly about the artifacts !!!
Before I fill the form I set the tolerance of the fill to around 150
So what happens is - the color goes to the very edge of the line art (may even go a little inside it) but because the color is set to DARKEN it never deletes it.
You can experiment with the tolerance number for better results.
All this is in case you are just filing a form with clear color - all this will be done in one lair.
Hi Matt,
I believe this technique goes well with your storyboard fill action you showed us. Thanks for the vid, it's really basic but we so easily forget easy tricks like this to improve efficiency.
I know 2 more options for this,
-Click with the Magic Wand Tool inside the object (if you have multiple planes connecting just shift+click those too) then go to Select->Modify->Expand, judging by the thickness and cleanliness of your lines expand you selection with the appropriate amount of pixels (usually 2-3 with me). This one tends to have the opposite effect and you usually have to fill in tiny places and sharp hooks manually but overall I feel it leaves a cleaner base colour.
-Now this doesn't really work with very detailed lineart, my second option is usually (mostly) painting the edges and use the bucket to fill it up once I made an enclosed circle of the colour, its a tad faster than painting the entire base colour.
Hey,
I have never commented on this site, but I felt I had to say something to this. The paint-bucket tool has a few parameters that fix the pixel-lines issue you mention. First, as you mentioned yourself, it is always good to keep the color and line layers separate. Then, on the color layer, instead of taking the whole select-invert-selection-fill process, simply take the paint-bucket tool, check the "All layers" parameter, and modify the tolerance to a higher value. Finally, simply fill your line art.
That's about it. If you do want to take the selection-process mentioned in this video; once you have selected the line art's content, with any selection-tool in use, click the "refine edge" button at the top bar. That will allow you to highly customize the actual selection-map. (this is a feature extremely improved in CS5+.
Hope that helps,
Chris
Hi Matt,
Will you be doing a video for the paint bucket and scanned line art. You alluded to it in this video. Just wondering if that is coming up or has it been covered. If so can you point me there? Thanks.