Show HN: Make your logo extra bright on HDR screens

telecuda · 2026-08-22T18:43:03.000Z

Certain logos started standing out to me on LinkedIn as brighter/whiter than everything else around them.I dug in and found out this is accomplished by adding a gain-map to an existing JPEG, visible only on HDR screens like a newer MacBook Pro. LinkedIn is the only social network I've found that isn't stripping them out, but of course you serve them up on your own site.I worked with Claude Code to turn it into a little browser-based utility (no registration) and hope you find it useful!

anigbrowl 2 days ago |

> Every social network strips these tags except the worst one

> Clearly we need more of it

I do not in fact want sites trying to get around my display preferences to post their visual presence on screen.

Grombobulous 1 day ago | |

If you own an HDR display then your display preference was to be able to display HDR.

Settings > Accessibility > Display Text & Size > Reduce White Point

illiac786 1 day ago | | |

I own an HDR screen to display HDR content *when and where I want it*. It has significant value in photography for example. But I certainly don’t want to be looking at hdr ads.

Grombobulous 1 day ago | | |

How can we expect to give out a technical ability like HDR but then gatekeep it to only “artistically-valid” endeavors? Who is the arbiter of taste?

Ultimately, you choose what websites you go to, just like people who create websites choose how to present them.

Retr0id 1 day ago | | |

We gave websites the ability to auto-play audio, then they showed they couldn't be trusted with this privilege and we took it away again. We can do the same with HDR images, gating them behind a "click to view", or "allow this site to display HDR content" (plausibly someone could do this with a browser extension already)

Grombobulous 1 day ago | | |

I’d certainly be happy to see more controls in the browser side to help control this.

I personally don’t consider this anywhere near as problematic as auto-play audio, but I recognize that that’s subjective.

IshKebab 1 day ago | | |

There's a pretty simple solution - gate it on full screen mode.

DauntingPear7 1 day ago | | |

I witnessed my first HDR mobile game banner ads recently and it’s horrible and should honestly be illegal or something

hombre_fatal 1 day ago | | |

Impressive, wrong on both counts.

(1) HDR display (e.g. you bought a macbook/iphone) doesn’t mean you want random videos in the instagram feed to be full brightness despite setting your screen brightness to minimum in a dark room and (2) reducing white point just darkens stuff across the display, it doesn’t disable the thing people are complaining about.

Grombobulous 1 day ago | | |

I just figured out that low power mode also disables HDR and that’s a one-click toggle.

So to me the user has an off switch and the content creator also gets to express their creative freedom to use the feature or not.

If you don’t want to see HDR content you can do something else with your day. Nobody is holding us hostage to use our phones in a dark room or scroll Instagram.

solarkraft 1 day ago | | |

iOS does not have this switch and it’s a pretty common platform. Low power mode also disables other things. You can of course do what you want with your creative freedom, you’ll just have to live with peoples’ reactions for non-consensually showing them something they passionately do not want to see.

Grombobulous 1 day ago | | |

I just disagree with this concept of “non-consent” in this context.

This would be like buying a color TV and getting upset that the commercials don’t remain in black and white, and saying you didn’t consent to that.

But unlike in the color TV analogy we have two methods of disabling (low power mode and reduce white point setting) and we don’t just have 3 TV channels to choose from.

I will definitely concede that the browser and OS should have more controls around this feature.

m463 1 day ago | |

Maybe it would be more acceptable if you added louder 24-bit music to the logo?

laptoprabbit 1 day ago |

For your uBO (Lite) custom filters

soverybright.com##:style(dynamic-range-limit: standard !important)

linkedin.com##:style(dynamic-range-limit: standard !important)

keane 2 days ago |

For an authoritative overview of high dynamic range on monitors, I recommend the 137 minute documentary Debunking HDR (Steve Yedlin, 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44248968

wlesieutre 2 days ago |

Please don't

daigoba66 2 days ago |

I’ve noticed this trend on LinkedIn just recently. Very noticeable at night, obviously, when my screen is naturally more dim. But these logos are like blinding headlights.

Retr0id 2 days ago |

I'm on an SDR setup so I wasn't expecting to see the proper effect, but the square labeled "SDR White" is actually `rgb(220, 220, 220)`.

mikeshi42 1 day ago |

I’ve always wondered why it happened, assumed it was a rendering bug.

fwiw it seems like “reduce white point” overrides any of these effects - which is good.

froh42 2 days ago |

Oooh fuuuuuuck. Do we now have the HDR screen version of the 90s/00s CD volume wars? MAX IT OUT?!? BE LOUDER! BE BRIGHTER! WTF.

madaxe_again 2 days ago | |

Our new brand awareness strategy involves firing high power lasers directly into the prospect’s eyes, burning the logo into the centre of their fovea.

This way we get to skip awareness, interest and desire and get the prospect straight to action.

the__alchemist 1 day ago | |

Those wars still are onmnipresent in recorded music. (But haven't hit theaters yet, JCBP)

leni536 2 days ago | |

It goes up to 11

telecuda 2 days ago | | |

"It's such a fine line between stupid, and uh" ... "Clever."

solarkraft 1 day ago |

Why would you want everyone to hate you?

Voultapher 12 hours ago | |

Can't wait for the HDR max brightness red blinking notification bubble desperately begging for your attention. Please you must look at our advertisement!

portugueasey 2 days ago |

This extra-bright-everything-on-HDR-screens crap makes me navigate away from sites every time.

Immediate irritation and if I could setup an adblock rule to stop it somehow, I would.

The worst cases give me the starting pangs of a headache, and make me adjust my display to account for it.

Can we somehow make it a rule that a website has to ask if they can blind me first?

alpaca9 2 days ago |

Look at the bright side, if it starts to get really overused then maybe the other platforms like LinkedIn will start stripping them too.

dathinab 2 days ago | |

and browsers might do so too

like something on the line of "if (image small || partially covered || mostly transparent) then don't use HDR"

uhoh-itsmaciek 2 days ago |

In Firefox, the page tells me neither my browser nor my display support HDR. In Chrome, it works fine. Latest browsers on a Pixel 8.

nvr219 2 days ago | |

I noticed this as well on Firefox and I say, good, please don't fix.

bigstrat2003 2 days ago |

This seems like yet another reason to not run HDR. It is kind of annoying even when used responsibly, but now we'll have people using it irresponsibly too.

jtbayly 1 day ago |

I hit an advertisement in Gas Buddy that was super bright, clearly using HDR yesterday. Bummer.

varun_ch 2 days ago |

If you use HDR videos, you can get bright white even on soon browsers that don’t support HDR images

dylan604 2 days ago |

I just noticed something similar today as an ad where the green oval button was so bright that the rest of the white screen felt grayish/dull than white. It could not be unnoticed playing on the notion that the eye is attracted to the brightest thing on the screen

nikhilmishra01 17 hours ago |

I just updated my brand's logo using this. thanks

perryizgr8 2 days ago |

The page says it should work on my phone but it doesn't. No difference between the SDR and HDR versions on my phone (S26 Ultra / Chrome).

Jaxan 2 days ago | |

It also depends on your screen brightness. In my case, if it’s set to maximum, there is no difference between SDR and HDR.

AaronAPU 2 days ago | | |

I’m known for having my brightness down to the minimum at all times. The demo page effect is very pronounced. Effectively, it is ignoring my system level preference which makes me hate it a lot.

telecuda 2 days ago | | |

That's what I'm finding as I researched it:

Android's HDR brightness slider is low - The single most common "HDR does nothing" report on Android 15/16 devices. Samsung also has Super HDR/Extra brightness / Vision booster toggles under Display. Any of them at the conservative setting would have an effect.

mattlondon 2 days ago | | |

Came here to say this. It just cranks the brightness up for the pixels. But if you are already at 100% there is not much headroom so all the "before and after" for me were pretty hard to differentiate. There was some minor difference if I studied it closely but I'd probably not notice it during normal use it was so slight.

If I went down to say 50% brightness then it was much more pronounced, but who lives their life with their eyes only half open like that?!

telecuda 2 days ago | |

I was only able to test it on my iPhone. Let me see if the S26 needs a tweak (or confirm if it's not support)

villgax 1 day ago |

Assaults the senses takes a new example now.

kccqzy 2 days ago |

I hate gain maps in JPEGs. I noticed that because I insisted on capturing JPEGs and not HEIF on my iPhone, and I found that the iPhone would also show overexposed parts (such as the sky) brighter than plain white. That's how I came to know gain maps. Fortunately on iOS, although I cannot disable the inclusion of gain maps in photos I take with Camera.app, I can stop Photos.app from rendering them: just turn off "View Full HDR" in the settings.

The Metapho app on iOS seems to be a good app to view the gain map itself. I give it no access to my photos and use the share sheet to view gain maps of specific images.

jonplackett 2 days ago |

Please don’t do this.

You know it will be annoying.

masklinn 2 days ago | |

On the other hand it’s a great signal that whoever uses that is an obnoxious twat and should be plonked.

Cameri 2 days ago | | |

Plonked how many times?

xoxxala 1 day ago | | |

Technically, you only need to plonk somebody once.

https://en.everybodywiki.com/Plonk_(Usenet)

madaxe_again 2 days ago | |

We found that user engagement was substantially increased by making the home page just rapidly flicker between red and green. Some users stared at it for hours!

danillonunes 2 days ago | | |

Didn't worked so well for the Pokémon show.

opengrass 2 days ago |

Waddabout an ImageMagick command or explanation how to export in Inkscape?

pentaphobe 1 day ago |

This is why we can't have nice things.

DonHopkins 2 days ago |

Now how can I draw Vantablack text on HD white for the highest possible contrast?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

ris 1 day ago |

This is why we can't have nice things.