Make your logo brighter than white

Chris Bennett · so very bright

3 min read Original article ↗

Upload a logo, choose which colors should glow, download an HDR JPEG. On HDR screens the chosen parts shine up to 7.5× brighter than #FFFFFF. Everywhere else it's a perfectly normal JPEG.

Drop your logo here, or click to choose

PNG, JPEG or WebP · free · nothing is stored

  • ISO 21496-1 gain-map JPEG
  • BT.2100 PQ for LinkedIn
  • base pixels untouched
  • nothing stored
  • free
Two identical #FFFFFF squares.One carries a gain map.

SDR white
as bright as a screen normally goes

The same white with a gain map: up to 7.5× brighter on an HDR display

HDR white · +2.9 stops
up to 7.5× brighter

Checking your display and browser…

Examples

Original artwork, converted with this tool. Drag the handle; on an HDR display in a capable browser the right side glows. “Use this” loads the original into the tool above.

The wordmark

White type on black — the classic case. The whites are selected automatically.

glows: whites

Orbit mark

A white ring plus one brand color. Whites and the blue are both pushed to the same peak.

glows: whites + #2f6bff

Sticker badge

Cream type on dark teal — not white, so it's picked as a color. Light elements on dark backgrounds glow best.

glows: #f5e9c8

How it works

Your JPEG stays a normal JPEG. For the web we add an ISO 21496-1 gain map — a second, tiny grayscale image that tells HDR-aware software how much brighter each pixel may go. For LinkedIn we write the pixels in BT.2100 PQ with the matching ICC profile, which LinkedIn preserves.

What glows best

Light, near-white elements on dark backgrounds. Strong (+2.9 stops, ~1,500 nits) is the measured real-world sweet spot. Dark colors can't really glow — boosting them reads as washed neon.

Honest limits

HDR only shows on HDR displays in software that honors gain maps or PQ profiles (Chrome, Safari 26, Apple Photos, LinkedIn's apps). Most other platforms strip or normalize it — the file still looks perfectly normal there.

Also works on text

Text can be brighter than white, too.

CSS has no way to write a color brighter than #FFFFFF yet — the HDR color spaces in CSS Color HDR are still a draft. But you can paint real text through an HDR image: background-clip: text turns the glyphs into a window onto a gain-map JPEG. The headline at the top of this page is exactly that — select it, it's text.

Brighter than white

SDR text
color: #fff

Brighter than white

HDR text
background-clip: text over the swatch

Checking your display and browser…

  • Where it works: wherever gain-map JPEGs render — Chrome 137+, Safari 26 / iOS 26 — on an HDR display. Elsewhere the swatch's base image shows through, so the text is simply white. Nothing breaks.
  • The swatch is a 64×64 white JPEG carrying a uniform gain map (7.5×, +2.9 stops, ~1,500 nits); the browser scales it under the glyphs. Any boost works: upload a white square to the tool above and pick an intensity.
  • Gate it on the display: inside @media (dynamic-range: high) only HDR screens take the image route; SDR visitors, Firefox and print keep a real color. That also sidesteps the one gotcha — background-clip only paints ink inside the element's box, so an overflowing line would get clipped.
  • Headlines and accents only. A paragraph at 1,500 nits is hostile. Give ::selection a color if yours is not already visible.
  • Why not filter: brightness()? The page is composited in SDR; no filter or blend mode pushes a CSS color past white. Only HDR content gets the headroom — which is what the swatch is.