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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!
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.
It goes up to 11
"It's such a fine line between stupid, and uh" ... "Clever."
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.
Those wars still are onmnipresent in recorded music. (But haven't hit theaters yet, JCBP)
This is fun and will try to embed it in our project next week.
Please don’t. Your profile states that you’re an ethical hacker.
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
Please don’t do this.
You know it will be annoying.
On the other hand it’s a great signal that whoever uses that is an obnoxious twat and should be plonked.
Plonked how many times?
Technically, you only need to plonk somebody once.
https://en.everybodywiki.com/Plonk_(Usenet)
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.
Uninstall the app? Leave a review, tell the developer.
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.)
That’s a good idea, I haven’t used the shortcuts feature. I think this app also abuses the ability to change the app icon to provide subtle animations - but there’s no option to turn it off or customise.
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.
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.
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?
I’d assume it’s the display manager dimming sdr content to have sufficient brightness range for hdr content.
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.
I think they meant that by making an element brighter than the rest you basically change the contrast and the rest will feel dimmer
On mac the OS remaps the brightness range when HDR content appears. The rest of the content literally and materially dims.
Lol, so one HDR element on a website changes the entire desktop environment to be dimmer? :P Fun implementation.
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.
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.
Just tested it, everything but the bright dimmed. That’s very annoying. On an iPhone 14 Pro…
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?
GovTech is still full of them. But B2B/B2C, you're right.
The nagging will continue until morale improves.
The <blink> tag's spiritual successor.
If you want to opt-out of the second coming of <blink>:
chrome://flags/#force-color-profile -> sRGB
Oh, I bet the author is kicking himself for not including a blinking high-brightness class.
Or better, a blink tag that switches between HDR and non HDR text.
Ain’t no use unless you wrap that bad boy in a <marquee> too.
Have you no mercy within you ... you ... web developer.
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!
Didn't worked so well for the Pokémon show.
Pokemon is the most valuable franchise IP on the planet. Maybe it did work well.
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).
It also depends on your screen brightness. In my case, if it’s set to maximum, there is no difference between SDR and HDR.
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?!
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.
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.
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)
Works for text too!
I do not in fact want sites trying to get around my display preferences to post their visual presence on screen.
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
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.
I witnessed my first HDR mobile game banner ads recently and it’s horrible and should honestly be illegal or something
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.
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)
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.
Auto-playing audio used to be fine too, it took a while for certain websites to learn how annoying they could be with it - give HDR some time!
I’m starting to wonder if this is a good idea for a Safari browser extension (if that’s something that can be controlled that way)
There's a pretty simple solution - gate it on full screen mode.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it would be more acceptable if you added louder 24-bit music to the logo?
Waddabout an ImageMagick command or explanation how to export in Inkscape?
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.
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.
I noticed this as well on Firefox and I say, good, please don't fix.
If you use HDR videos, you can get bright white even on soon browsers that don’t support HDR images
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
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.
Now how can I draw Vantablack text on HD white for the highest possible contrast?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack
Please don't
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.
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)`.
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.
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?
Look at the bright side, if it starts to get really overused then maybe the other platforms like LinkedIn will start stripping them too.
and browsers might do so too
like something on the line of "if (image small || partially covered || mostly transparent) then don't use HDR"
For your uBO (Lite) custom filters
soverybright.com##:style(dynamic-range-limit: standard !important)
linkedin.com##
:style(dynamic-range-limit: standard !important)I hit an advertisement in Gas Buddy that was super bright, clearly using HDR yesterday. Bummer.
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.
…and it’s slop.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Thanks, I hate it. This just makes me think that I don't want to use a browser that supports HDR...
That was the point, ...right?
Assaults the senses takes a new example now.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Why would you want everyone to hate you?