I want to programmatically modify a bitmap using python but don\'t really need a thorough grounding in the subject, so would like to concentrate on learning just what I need
PIL has an undocumented function ImageDraw.floodfill:
>>> import ImageDraw
>>> help(ImageDraw.floodfill)
Help on function floodfill in module ImageDraw:
floodfill(image, xy, value, border=None)
Fill bounded region.
(Flood-filling should generally be a last resort because it interacts poorly with anti-aliased lines. It is usually better to get the actual boundary data for the counties and then draw a filled polygon. However, PIL doesn't support anti-aliased line drawing so this advice is useless unless you switch your drawing module to something more capable like PythonMagick or pycairo.)