The LinkedIn HDR Logo Trick: How to Make Your Logo Glow Brighter Than White

Scroll through LinkedIn on a recent iPhone or MacBook and you might spot it: a company logo or profile picture whose whites are brighter than the white of the page around it. Brighter than your screen's "maximum" white. A glowing logo, super-white, as if it were lit from behind.

That is not a design trick. It is High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging, the same technology behind HDR video on Netflix and the photos your phone takes, applied to a static brand asset. A normal screen white sits at a couple of hundred nits (the unit of luminance). An HDR-capable display can push small areas to 1,000 nits and beyond, and browsers like Chrome and Safari will happily render an HDR image that bright, right in the middle of an otherwise standard web page. That is why an HDR logo on LinkedIn appears to defy your brightness settings.

We wanted this for our own logo. What we found is that the obvious way to do it, the way Photoshop's own HDR tools point you toward, does not survive LinkedIn's upload processing. The method that actually works is different, and nobody had documented it properly. So we reverse-engineered a live glowing logo, byte by byte, and this is the full tutorial.

You can see the result on our LinkedIn page and on the page of our friends at Mahala.ai. Open either on an HDR screen (any recent iPhone, iPad, MacBook, or a good OLED phone) and the logo whites will visibly exceed the interface white.

First, the terminology you need

Five terms, and the whole article makes sense.

SDR and HDR. Standard Dynamic Range is everything you are used to: pixel values from black to a fixed white. High Dynamic Range extends the top end, so an image can describe brightness levels well beyond normal white.

Nits. The measurement of luminance. SDR reference white is commonly treated as around 203 nits (the ITU BT.2408 "graphics white"). HDR highlights on modern displays reach 1,000 to 2,000 nits.

Gain map. Adobe and Google's approach to HDR photos (Google calls it Ultra HDR, standardized as ISO 21496-1). The file contains a normal SDR image plus a second, hidden grayscale image that tells HDR displays how much to boost each area. Photoshop and Camera Raw export this format.

PQ. Perceptual Quantizer, the transfer function standardized as SMPTE ST 2084 and used by HDR10 video. Instead of storing brightness relative to screen white, PQ pixel values map to absolute nits, all the way to 10,000.

ICC profile. A small block of metadata embedded in an image that tells software how to interpret its colors. This one turns out to be the hero of the story.

Step 1: Prepare the logo in Photoshop

1. Open your logo artwork in Photoshop.
2. Set up a square canvas: Image > Canvas Size, equal width and height. LinkedIn's recommended company logo size is 400 x 400 pixels, but any square size works; LinkedIn scales it down.
3. Flatten everything onto a solid background: Layer > Flatten Image. No transparency. The glow effect needs a JPEG, and JPEGs have no alpha channel anyway.
4. Make sure the parts you want to glow are genuinely white or near-white. Check with the eyedropper: you want values close to RGB 255, 255, 255. The boost targets the near-white range, so off-white greys will glow less.
5. Save this as your master SDR file (File > Save a Copy, JPEG or PNG, maximum quality).

Step 2: The Photoshop HDR export everyone tries first (and why we are showing it to you)

Photoshop's Camera Raw has genuine HDR editing. For completeness, this is the standard workflow:

1. Open your flattened logo in Camera Raw (via Bridge, or File > Open with Camera Raw preferences set for JPEG/TIFF).
2. Enable HDR editing: the HDR toggle next to the histogram (in recent versions, check Camera Raw Preferences > Defaults for "Enable HDR editing" if you do not see it).
3. Raise the exposure of your whites into the extended range. About +2 stops is a tasteful glow; each stop doubles the brightness.
4. Export with File Settings: Format JPEG, enable HDR Output and Maximize Compatibility, quality 90 to 100, color space Display P3.

The result is a gain-map HDR JPEG. Open it in macOS Finder or Preview on an HDR screen and it glows beautifully. Even LinkedIn's upload preview shows the glow.

Then you hit Save, LinkedIn processes the image, and the glow is gone.

Step 3: Why your HDR logo loses its glow after uploading to LinkedIn

We tested this repeatedly. The export was correct every time. So we downloaded a live glowing logo straight from LinkedIn's CDN and inspected it with ExifTool, alongside our own Camera Raw export.

Our export carried its HDR in two places: a second hidden image inside the file (stored via MPF, the Multi-Picture Format, which is the gain map itself) and an XMP metadata packet (the hdrgm namespace) describing how to apply it.

LinkedIn re-encodes every uploaded logo. In that re-encode, MPF segments and XMP metadata are discarded. The gain map does not survive. That is the entire failure.

But the live glowing logo, which had already been through LinkedIn's pipeline, was something else entirely: a plain, single-layer, 8-bit progressive JPEG. No gain map. No XMP. Its HDR lived in exactly one place: an embedded ICC profile named "Rec2020 Gamut with PQ Transfer."

That profile tells browsers to interpret the pixel values with the PQ transfer function in the Rec. 2020 color gamut. The pixels themselves are PQ-encoded, meaning the whites are written as absolute luminance values of 800, 1,500, even 3,000 nits. And because ICC profiles are the one thing LinkedIn's image pipeline preserves through re-encoding, the glow passes through untouched.

In short: LinkedIn strips HDR metadata but keeps color management. So the trick is to smuggle the HDR inside the color management.

Step 4: The HDR format that survives LinkedIn

The final step is a color space conversion that Photoshop's export dialogs do not offer directly: take the SDR logo, boost only the near-white areas by about +2 stops, convert the pixels from their original gamut (sRGB or Display P3) into Rec. 2020, encode them with the PQ curve at an absolute luminance (background at its normal brightness, whites at roughly 800 nits), and save a progressive JPEG with the Rec2020 PQ ICC profile embedded.

Done by hand, that is a page of color mathematics. So we automated it.

We packaged the whole conversion as a free Claude skill called linkedin-hdr-logo. If you use Claude (the desktop app with Cowork, or Claude Code), you drop the skill file in, hand Claude your square, flattened logo from Step 1, and say "make the whites glow for LinkedIn." Claude runs the conversion and gives you back the finished JPEG. The default boost is +2 stops; ask for +3 if you want the stronger, Metaview-style glow, and treat +3.9 (about 3,000 nits) as the ceiling before it looks blown out.

Download the skill for free on our GitHub: github.com/Adamodigi/linkedin-hdr-logo

A note on taste: this is a spotlight, not a floodlight. On SDR screens your logo looks completely normal, which is exactly right. On HDR screens it should read as premium, not as a flashbang. Start at +2.

Step 5: Verify, then upload

1. Open the converted JPEG in macOS Preview or Finder on an HDR display. The whites should visibly exceed the window chrome around them. On Windows, Chrome or Edge with HDR enabled shows the same.
2. Do not re-save the file in any other tool. A re-save that swaps or strips the ICC profile kills the effect.
3. Upload to LinkedIn as your company logo the normal way.
4. Check your page from an HDR device. The glow now survives, because there is nothing left for LinkedIn to strip.

Frequently asked questions