Sometimes when I made a selection on a layer and try to fill with the paint
bucket or drag the foreground color it will not work. Sometime the whole layer
will not fill in.

When you select the Bucket Fill tool, you have in the Tool options,

a. Fill whole selection b. Fill similar colors.

Which one had you selected?

Owen

On 19/07/14 12:05, billn wrote:

Sometimes when I made a selection on a layer and try to fill with the paint bucket or drag the foreground color it will not work. Sometime the whole layer will not fill in.

A useful check list: When suddenly nothing seems to work anymore...

On 19/07/14 21:36, billn wrote:

attached is a copy of a file I am playing with and can not get it to full selections.

Attachments:
* http://www.gimpusers.com/system/attachments/128/original/gimp_forum.png

The selection applies to the whole image, it is not related to a specific layer. When you paint, the paint goes to the pixels that are both in the selection (more accurately, covered by the selection mask) and, of course, in the active layer. In your image, the selection is completely outside of the active layer ("Excellent screen") so if you try to paint in the selection, you are painting outside your active layer and if you try to pain on "Excellent screen" you are painting outside of the selection. In either case nothing happens.

Depending on what you want to do, select the other layer, or use Layer>Layer to image size to make "Exellent screen" cover the whole canvas.

This is somewhat item 2) in the check list.