Experiments in HDR
First published as a thread on X Summer 2026.
Best viewed in Chrome / Brave browsers.
In my recent works I’ve use HDR color (High Dynamic Range)…
Gamuts
The human eye can perceive millions of colors — far more than most screens can show.
Computer displays have a range of colors they’re capable of producing using RGB combinations. This is called a color gamut. The human color gamut is a lot wider than a display.
Think of an old CRT TV and the limited colours in ‘Teletext’ couple of blues, magenta, green, yellow. You had 8 colours to work with.
An extremely limited palette, so you end up with red palm tree trunks.
Colour Profiles
Displays these days can show millions of colours. We have colour profiles based on device gamut and the end-intended-use of image. Profiles are embedded into images, most common being sRGB which is a common format for submitting photography to galleries and photo libraries.
Technology has moved on and with 'retina' and high definition displays can display far more than sRGB allows. SRGB is a basic standard but it gives us less than 40% of the colour palette than we can actually see
Cinema, photography and gaming tend to need wider gamuts. (Explosions, dark scenes.). HDR came into its own a few years back in photography. It allowed a wider range of colour points between the darkest and the lightest, many cameras did this with multiple exposures combined.
YouTube and Amazon stream in HDR now. If your display isnt 4k, then you just see plain old sRGB.
You can test if you have HDR capability here colorgamuts.com and here wide-gamut.com
P3 and Rec.2020 gamuts
DCI P3 gamut is a new standard you might find in Photoshop and film editing software. This can show 10-20% more of visible colours.
Even wider is Rec.2020 which aims to replicate human vision.
HDR ≠ just 'brighter.' It’s brighter highlights, deeper shadows, more visible detail.
Non-standard as standard
What does that mean for a digital artist? Well, it’s a bit all over the place at the moment.
The web standard is sRGB, but HDR is starting to creep in. It’s particularly useful in UIs where you might want to add highlights for interaction.
Browsers
Browser and device support is growing. Firefox has none, Safari says it does, but WebKit is controlled at the device level. Chrome can support Device-P3 tags as can Brave and Opera.
In CSS we can define HDR colour with media queries and specific tags. There’s fallback options available too. So in html it’s supposed to work, but display largely depends on your device / screen and viewport. Pitfalls are in which colour models. OKLA, LAB, RGBa, Display-p3…
…there's so many variants. But you can play with them here: hueplot.ardov.me
Devices
Device support varies. Android apparently, yes. Early iPhones no. I can’t display Rec.2020 HDR in Safari but if I right click save as into ‘photos’ I can switch on HDR and it shows. My retina MacBook works with some apps. iPad Pro/Chrome seems to be overridden by the OS. (at time of writing)
Apps
Photoshop has support for JPEG-XL but you can’t use that in webpages. TIFF files support HDR. Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity Photo/Designer support it through settings (enable 32bit colour - if you can’t see it you can't create!) All export files with HDR colour profiles.
File formats
PNG had its first update in 20-odd years this year. It now supports animation (officially) through APNG, and now has HDR support. I recently tested PNG and made some static works featuring PNG HDR. They glow incredibly in the right viewport. Note - I’ve used a photo of the screen - it shows the ‘bright white’ of the page as a mid-grey. That’s how bright it is on objkt.com. Using Chrome or Brave, see it here
Platforms
Platforms are a mess. X supports in places (my PFP is HDR). Posts sometimes, I’m guessing it’s the downsampling. Instagram seems to show it, FB no. Farcaster no, Bluesky no. Discord no.
Then there’s gallery spec. digital frames. I’ve not had a chance test or send files to any manufacturer (please DM if you’re reading).
I don’t know if HDR uses more energy, whether there’s issues around long-term screen burn.
Of course there’s the problem of what it means for colour blind people, accessibility etc.
After a week of working in HDR with flat colours, my eyes are very very tired.
Gamma.io supports it. I made some works that feature HDR via CSS in html with SVGs. See how they glow compared to others. Again the white screen is shown as mid-grey.
Hacking SVG
SVG isn’t supposed to support HDR all. I’ve made it work with media queries. I embedding a base64 1px PNG to fool browsers into thinking it’s an HDR file. This one is animated
I minted the first one fully-on-chain on objkt.com and it displays just fine but took some work. See it here with Chrome or Brave.
Another animated one here I call 'HDR Landscape' is an HDR version of one of my prints.
Ends.