A photo that outshines the feed.
Drop in a photo and pick how bright it burns. You get a full-size HDR JPEG whose highlights climb past white on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and look like a normal photo everywhere else.
- HDR JPEG
- Full size or 4096 px
- Runs in your browser
How it works
Light past paper white
An ordinary photo tops out at paper white, the white of a page on screen, which HDR standards put at 203 nits. Nothing in the file can go brighter, so on an HDR screen it leaves most of the panel's range unused.
This tool lifts brightness in linear light, keeping every colour as it was, and saves the photo with a Rec. 2020 PQ profile, which describes brightness in nits. The highlights can then climb up to 1,000 nits on screens that have the headroom, while the shadows stay where they were.
In the clip every dot is one pixel of the example photo, placed by its column and its brightness in nits. Turning Brightness up lifts the bright pixels past the paper white line; the dark ones barely move.
Tips
Getting the most glow
- Bright, colourful photos glow the most: sunsets, neon, city lights, a backlit face. A flat grey shot has little to lift.
- The glow shows on HDR screens: iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro and HDR monitors. It is most striking in dark mode, where everything around your photo is dim.
- Post the downloaded file as it is. Running it through an editor or a messaging app first can strip the HDR.
- Not every app shows HDR photos, and some strip the HDR when they re-compress an upload. Check how it looks after posting.
Controls
What the controls do
Brightness sets how far above normal white the brightest parts of the photo go. 3× is a good default. Past about 4× the highlights reach the ceiling a phone can show, so higher settings brighten the rest of the photo instead.
Highlight focus decides which parts glow. At 0 the whole photo is lifted evenly; higher values keep the glow to the parts that were already bright, like the sky, lights and reflections.
Optimize for X keeps the long side at 4,096 px or less. X seems to drop the HDR from larger images, so leave it on for posts. Turn it off to keep every pixel, for example when you send the file to your own phone.
FAQ