Show HN: Make your logo extra bright on HDR screens

ttelecuda about 8 hours ago 60 commentsRead Article on soverybright.com

ES version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

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!

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Discussion (60 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

anigbrowl•about 6 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.

Grombobulous•about 1 hour 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

daigoba66•about 6 hours 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.

wlesieutre•about 3 hours ago

Please don't

keane•about 5 hours 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

laptoprabbit•about 2 hours ago

For your uBO (Lite) custom filters

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

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

mikeshi42•about 2 hours 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.

jtbayly•about 2 hours ago

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

froh42•about 6 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•about 5 hours 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•about 6 hours ago

It goes up to 11

telecuda•about 5 hours ago

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

alpaca9•about 3 hours 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•about 2 hours 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"

Retr0id•about 3 hours 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)`.

uhoh-itsmaciek•about 6 hours 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•about 6 hours ago

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

varun_ch•about 6 hours ago

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

dylan604•about 6 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•about 5 hours 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.

opengrass•about 6 hours ago

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

jonplackett•about 6 hours ago

Please don’t do this.

You know it will be annoying.

masklinn•about 6 hours ago

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

Cameri•about 4 hours ago

Plonked how many times?

xoxxala•about 2 hours ago

Technically, you only need to plonk somebody once.

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

fjlunky•about 6 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•about 5 hours 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•about 6 hours ago

Uninstall the app? Leave a review, tell the developer.

gerdesj•about 6 hours ago

The <blink> tag's spiritual successor.

hyperhello•about 5 hours ago

Oh, I bet the author is kicking himself for not including a blinking high-brightness class.

shaky-carrousel•about 5 hours ago

Or better, a blink tag that switches between HDR and non HDR text.

telecuda•about 5 hours ago

If you want to opt-out of the second coming of <blink>:

chrome://flags/#force-color-profile -> sRGB

madaxe_again•about 5 hours ago

Ain’t no use unless you wrap that bad boy in a <marquee> too.

gerdesj•about 3 hours ago

Have you no mercy within you ... you ... web developer.

madaxe_again•about 5 hours 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•about 4 hours ago

Didn't worked so well for the Pokémon show.

telecuda•about 6 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•about 6 hours 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.

Grombobulous•about 1 hour ago

Dimming the entire display is not how HDR works especially on OLED phone displays.

If you are not outside in bright sunlight it’s almost certain that your screen is not at its highest brightness in the first place.

All HDR is doing is adding more range between the darkest element and the brightest element.

I.e., if you go to this webpage and set your screen brightness to maximum, the HDR effect visibly goes away because you’re already telling your screen to maximize brightness everywhere. Put the screen brightness at 50% and the HDR effect is visible: the bright parts are brighter.

theturtletalks•about 5 hours 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•about 5 hours 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.

tjoff•about 5 hours 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•about 5 hours 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.

portugueasey•about 3 hours 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?

Stitch4223•about 6 hours ago

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

layer8•about 5 hours ago

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

suprjami•about 3 hours ago

Now someone vibe-code a browser extension which detects this and removes it.

A uBlock Origin rule for the whole domain of anybody who does this would be fine too.

bigstrat2003•about 3 hours 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.

nnevatie•about 1 hour ago

> Honest limits

…and it’s slop.

perryizgr8•about 6 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•about 6 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.

AaronAPU•about 3 hours 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•about 5 hours 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•about 5 hours 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•about 6 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)

DonHopkins•about 5 hours ago

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

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

telecuda•about 6 hours ago

Works for text too!