Fill slider with color burn blend mode

Question

I've had a lot of success enhancing color by using a Saturation adjustment layer (Sat set to a high value) and a blend mode of Color Burn or Color Dodge. The adjustment is controlled by lowering the Fill slider in the Layer panel down to 5 or 10%. I learned this from Unmesh Dinda on his Youtube video.

Unmesh explains how to use the method but not why it works. I’d like to understand why Fill works that way so I can control it better. Once the Fill value gets down in the 5% range, even small differences generate significant changes.

The blend modes where Fill works differently include:
Color Burn
Linear Burn
Color Dodge
Linear Dodge
Hard Light
Linear Light
Pin Light
Hard Mix

I'd appreciate any insights the Community can offer on how this technique achieves its results behind the scenes.

c.pfaffenbichler · Accepted Answer

Observation on two of the Blend Modes’ Fill behaviour:

• Hard Mix: Reducing the Fill seems to increase the number of resulting values (additional to white and black) correspondingly.

So if a Fill of 100% results in two values (white and black per Channel) 90% will result in 27 values, 50% in 129 etc.

• Color Burn: Reducing the Fill to X% gives identical result to maintaing the Fill at 100% but Clipping Masking a White Layer with (100-X)% Opacity to the Color Burn Layer.

c.pfaffenbichler · Answer

Not very voluminous, but one sentence at least seems to specifically address the issue with regard to the Blend Mode Hard Mix.

»• Hard Mix – Lighter colors lighten the result. Darker colors darken the result. Lowering the fill opacity creates less posterization/thresholding.«

https://jkost.com/blog/2018/08/working-with-blend-modes-in-photoshop-cc.html

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