Show HN: Make your logo extra bright on HDR screens

35 points by telecuda 3 hours ago

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!

jonplackett - 2 hours ago

Please don’t do this.

You know it will be annoying.

fjlunky - 2 hours ago

Pretty sure Fifth Star Labs’ Sky Guide iOS icon does this. Not the whole icon, just the stars in it. Hiding the app in a folder helps but I’m looking for a better alternative just because of this.
- layer8 - an hour ago
  
  As a workaround, you can use a home screen shortcut to start the app.
  But I agree that app developers shouldn’t do this, or should at least provide an option to turn it off. (Some apps allow customizing the app icon color, so it seems that should be possible.)
- pbhjpbhj - 2 hours ago
  
  Uninstall the app? Leave a review, tell the developer.
masklinn - 2 hours ago

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

The <blink> tag's spiritual successor.
- hyperhello - an hour ago
  
  Oh, I bet the author is kicking himself for not including a blinking high-brightness class.
- shaky-carrousel - an hour ago
  
  Or better, a blink tag that switches between HDR and non HDR text.
- telecuda - an hour ago
  
  If you want to opt-out of the second coming of <blink>:
  chrome://flags/#force-color-profile -> sRGB
- madaxe_again - an hour ago
  
  Ain’t no use unless you wrap that bad boy in a <marquee> too.
madaxe_again - an hour 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!
telecuda - 2 hours ago

I mean, use it responsibly. Of course people won't, it's the internet, but a skilled designer may use it to highlight a word or an accent to draw your eye. It can be tricky in dense interfaces to draw focus to something (little tooltips or big buttons aren't the best answers). This is just another tool in the toolbox.
- dawnerd - an hour ago
  
  It’s bad because it dims the entire display. You’re assuming your app is more important than whatever else might be displayed. It can also take a bit for the os to go back to the sdr state. I’ve had a few cases where safari gets stuck in hdr mode and won’t revert u til I force closed.
  - theturtletalks - an hour ago
    
    I saw a restaurant on Uber Eats with a HDR enhanced image. The whole screen felt dim but I thought it was just me. How can it dim the whole screen?
  - embedding-shape - an hour ago
    
    > It’s bad because it dims the entire display. You’re assuming your app is more important than whatever else might be displayed.
    What are you talking about? I have a HDR display, in Chrome on Arch the literal only change in the submission's demo is the brightness of that particular element, doesn't change anything else on the screen, sounds like you have a broken HDR implementation.
    
    dawnerd - an hour ago
    
    If your setup runs everything in forced hdr you won’t notice. OSes like MacOS will map sdr making everything look dim that’s not hdr.
    
    dgellow - an hour ago
    
    I think they meant that by making an element brighter than the rest you basically change the contrast and the rest will feel dimmer
- tjoff - an hour ago
  
  We haven't had dense interfaces for decades at this point.
  Still, even with the best intent what you suggest is still annoying. Okay, you got my attention, i now know what you wanted me to know. Are you going to nag me for all eternity?
  - telecuda - 29 minutes ago
    
    > We haven't had dense interfaces for decades at this point
    GovTech is still full of them. But B2B/B2C, you're right.
    The nagging will continue until morale improves.

froh42 - 2 hours 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 - an hour 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.
leni536 - 2 hours ago

It goes up to 11
- telecuda - 28 minutes ago
  
  "It's such a fine line between stupid, and uh" ... "Clever."

keane - an hour 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

anigbrowl - 2 hours 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.

daigoba66 - an hour 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.

uhoh-itsmaciek - an hour 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 - an hour ago

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

varun_ch - an hour ago

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

dylan604 - 2 hours 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

kccqzy - an hour 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.

sbustelo - 2 hours ago

It seems you have seen the same logo in LinkedIn that I did :)

https://www.bustelo.com.ar/apps/superbright/index.en.php

opengrass - an hour ago

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

Stitch4223 - 2 hours ago

This is fun and will try to embed it in our project next week.

layer8 - 44 minutes ago

Please don’t. Your profile states that you’re an ethical hacker.

perryizgr8 - 2 hours 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 hours 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.
- telecuda - an hour 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 - an hour 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 hours 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)

telecuda - 2 hours ago

Works for text too!

DonHopkins - 44 minutes ago

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

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