Photoshop window "frame" space has turned black

[Morgan19]

Picture this: you open a new document in Photoshop (CS, in my case), and drag the bottom-right tab out a bit so the document window is bigger than the document itself. That extra "frame" space should be grey. A minute ago I was working in Photoshop and suddenly that frame area turned black instead of grey. I've checked the image I was working on as well as a bunch of others and they're all that way, so it must be some program-wide setting. And this is with viewing documents in standard screen mode, not fullscreen mode (by pressing F a couple times) where it should be surrounded by black. Any ideas why the grey might have turned to black? It's incredibly annoying....

m19

[galenernest]

did you try "reset all tools" yet? It might be a long shot being that you're not describing a tool problem, but hey... otherwise dig around in preferences.... I've never had that problem before, but whenever photoshop isn't acting right for me, I go "reset all tools" first and it fixes it 80% of the time...

[MacGizmo]

You've come across an interesting feature in Photoshop. 99% of PS users have no idea you can do this, but it can be useful in some situations.

What you did was Shift + Click in the gray background area with black set as your primary color. When you Shift + Click in the background, it automatically changes the color to whatever you have selected.

If you want it back to its original gray state, you need to make your foreground color the following RGB settings then Shift + Click again in what you now have as a black area:
R=192
G=192
B=192

[galenernest]

The paint bucket tool had to be selected in order to change the frame color, for me. With the paint bucket tool selected, Shift-click into the frame space to change its color.

[simbalala]

The paint bucket tool had to be selected in order to change the frame color, for me. With the paint bucket tool selected, Shift-click into the frame space to change its color.

That makes sense, you're filling the frame with the foreground color.

I tried it earlier and couldn't get it to work but I had not tried the paint bucket tool. It's a nice feature because I've sometimes been annoyed by the default gray.

[MacGizmo]

Sorry, I assumed you would know, I should have put that in the original post!