Show HN: Make your logo extra bright on HDR screens

Posted by telecuda 3 hours ago

Show HN: Make your logo extra bright on HDR screens(www.soverybright.com)

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!

35 points | 42 comments

jonplackett 1 hour ago|

Please don’t do this.

You know it will be annoying.

fjlunky 1 hour 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 54 minutes 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 1 hour ago|||

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

masklinn 1 hour ago|||

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

gerdesj 1 hour ago|||

The <blink> tag's spiritual successor.

hyperhello 1 hour ago|||

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

shaky-carrousel 1 hour ago||||

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

telecuda 1 hour ago||||

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

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

madaxe_again 59 minutes ago|||

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

madaxe_again 55 minutes 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 1 hour 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 1 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 1 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 1 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 52 minutes 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 59 minutes 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 1 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 36 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 56 minutes 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 1 hour ago||

It goes up to 11

telecuda 34 minutes ago||

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

anigbrowl 1 hour 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.

keane 1 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

daigoba66 1 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 1 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 1 hour ago|

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

varun_ch 1 hour ago||

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

dylan604 1 hour 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 1 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 1 hour ago|

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

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

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