HDR logo glow, done properly
Superwhite is the HDR logo glow tool that produced the glowing Wiz, Taboola, Port, Lusha, DoiT and Prime Security logos on LinkedIn. Upload a logo, export a real HDR JPEG, post it.
Make my logo glow Runs in your browser, nothing is uploaded. Simple is €3 one time for unlimited exports at 400px. Creator €5 one time to 1400px. Pro €9 a month to 3840px.HDR logo glow, without the glow filter
An HDR logo glow is a logo whose white parts render above the display's normal white point. Nothing is painted around the mark. No blur, no halo, no bright pixels added. The pixels you already have are re-encoded as absolute luminance using the PQ curve from SMPTE ST 2084, wrapped in a Rec.2100 PQ colour profile, and an HDR display does the rest by spending its headroom on them. Interface white sits at about 203 nits. A Superwhite export can sit at 1,600 nits or more beside it.
The technique was documented by Tom Nick and the LinkedIn logo variant was reverse engineered by Gal Tidhar. Superwhite turned it into a maintained product with the pixel handling that a one-off script does not have.
What makes a logo glow well
Glows cleanly
- White or near-white wordmarks on a dark or saturated field
- Flat vector marks with hard edges
- Icons and monograms at logo sizes
- Bold headline text in a post graphic
Needs care
- Marks where white is most of the frame, the whole square lights up
- Soft gradients and drop shadows already in the artwork
- Off-white greys, which glow less than you expect
- Photographic backgrounds behind the mark
What Superwhite does to the pixels
Every HDR glow tool tags the file. Few of them fix what the tag exposes.
- Glow threshold. You choose which luminance counts as white, so the background and mid-tones of the logo stay exactly where they were.
- White flattening ramp. Pixels in the 90 to 97 percent range are blended toward pure white before encoding. Without this, invisible JPEG noise in the near-whites is amplified by the boost and the mark looks grainy.
- Dithering in PQ code space. At the top of the PQ curve adjacent 8-bit codes are far apart in nits, so smooth areas band. Floyd-Steinberg dithering hides that.
- True 4:4:4 chroma at quality 97. Subsampled chroma smears coloured edges against a glowing white. Superwhite writes full chroma resolution so the edge stays crisp after LinkedIn's own re-encode.
Where an HDR logo glow works
LinkedIn is the main target because LinkedIn strips almost all HDR metadata but keeps the ICC profile, on organic posts, company logos and paid Sponsored Content. Your own website works too, either with the same JPEG or with an HDR PNG. Meta platforms need a different format, a gain map JPEG, so the LinkedIn file will not glow on Instagram. Video does not carry the effect on LinkedIn at all, the transcoder rewrites the colour metadata to SDR. The full survival matrix is in LinkedIn HDR glow.
Pricing
Simple is €3 one time and covers unlimited exports at 400px, the size LinkedIn serves logos and avatars. Creator is €5 one time up to 1400px for post and ad graphics. Pro is €9 a month up to 3840px and adds batch export and saved brand presets, built for agencies running the effect across many clients. There are free tools in this category and we list every one of them in the comparison. The reason to pay is the output quality and the full-size tiers, not the tag.
Frequently asked questions
Is an HDR logo glow the same as a glow filter?
No. A glow filter paints bright pixels around a shape and those pixels are still ordinary white, so they can never be brighter than the page. An HDR logo glow re-encodes the existing pixels as absolute luminance so an HDR display renders them above interface white. Nothing is added to the artwork.
Which logos glow best?
White or light marks on a dark or saturated background, with hard edges. The effect is strongest when the glowing area is a minority of the frame. Off-white greys glow less, and soft gradients need a lower strength setting to avoid banding.
Will the glow survive LinkedIn's compression?
Yes, when uploaded directly as a JPEG. LinkedIn re-encodes at quality 90 but preserves the ICC profile, which is what carries the effect. Cropping or filtering in LinkedIn's composer, or re-saving in another editor, removes it.
Does Superwhite glow colours other than white?
Superwhite is built around the white and near-white case with a glow threshold you control, because that is what a logo on LinkedIn needs and it is where the quality problems live. Saturated colours have a hard brightness ceiling in Rec.2020 anyway, blue in particular, so colour glow is a much smaller effect.
Is Superwhite free?
No. Simple is 3 euro one time for unlimited 400px exports. Creator is 5 euro one time to 1400px. Pro is 9 euro a month to 3840px with batch and presets.
Which brands have used Superwhite for their logo glow?
The Wiz logo that made the effect famous, and the Taboola, Port, Lusha, DoiT and Prime Security logos on LinkedIn. Each has a case study on the blog with the settings used.