Stroke and Fill - Foreground and Background Color Boxes

If you read the last entry on the basic tools in PSE, you may have noticed I left the stoke (foreground) and fill (background) color box tools out. I wanted to cover them in an individual post. Let's take a look at the tools again. The color boxes are marked in blue:



The top box is stroke (foreground) and the bottom is fill (background). To toggle the colors in these boxes, click the opposing arrows:

You should see:



The keyboard shortcut for toggling the foreground and background colors is X.

The default colors in PSE are stroke (forground) of black and a fill (background) set to white. To return to those colors, use the little miniature color boxes off to the side.



You can also return to those default color settings at any time by hitting the D key on the keyboard.

Notes for Paint Shop Pro Refugees

In PSP, you can set up both the stroke and fill to use a solid color, a gradient, or a pattern by left-clicking on either color box to bring up the Material Properties options.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to put anything other than solid colors in PSE's color boxes. This is a small draw back because it means you can't directly draw and paint with gradients and patterns as easily.

PSP also allows you to toggle between applying the foreground and background colors to your canvas when using paint tools by using left and right mouse clicks. This doesn't happen in PSE. Right-clicking when the paint tools are selected just brings up the selected tool's context menu. This is a drawback I'm going to have to get used to because PSP's ability to toggle between colors with mouse clicks while painting has spoiled me. LOL I keep subconsciously trying to use this in PSE and it doesn't work.