How to Hack Your LinkedIn Profile Picture: The HDR Glow Trick

A Profile Picture That Breaks Your Screen’s Brightness Ceiling

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

That is not a design trick. It’s High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging – the tech behind HDR video on Netflix and your phone’s photos – 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. Browsers like Chrome and Safari will happily render an HDR image that bright, right in the middle of a standard web page. That is why an HDR logo on LinkedIn appears to defy your brightness settings.

Until recently, the method to make this survive LinkedIn’s upload pipeline wasn’t documented anywhere. We’re going to fix that. By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly how to make your profile picture glow, why the obvious Photoshop workflow fails – and how to do it in minutes, even without Photoshop. We’ll use real examples we’ve shipped: our own Chief Content Marketer logo, a founder profile photo, and two product logos.

Five Terms That Make the Whole Trick Make Sense

Before the steps, the terminology. Five terms and the entire article clicks into place.

SDR and HDR. Standard Dynamic Range is everything you’re 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. 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.

Prepare Your Image: Square, Flattened, True Whites

The output format has to be a JPEG, so your source file needs to be ready before any HDR conversion happens.

1. 1
   Use a square canvas

   LinkedIn’s recommended company logo size is 400 x 400 pixels, but any square size works – LinkedIn scales it down. The same applies to profile photos.
2. 2
   Flatten onto a solid background

   No transparency. Flatten everything onto your background color before exporting – the output format can’t carry an alpha channel.
3. 3
   Check your whites with the eyedropper

   The parts you want to glow should be genuinely white or near-white – values close to RGB 255, 255, 255. The boost targets the near-white range, so off-white greys will glow less.
4. 4
   Save your master SDR file

   JPEG or PNG, maximum quality. This is the file every conversion starts from.

The Photoshop HDR Export Everyone Tries First (and Why It Fails)

Photoshop’s Camera Raw has genuine HDR editing, and the standard workflow looks straightforward:

1. 1
   Open the flattened logo in Camera Raw

   Via Bridge, or File > Open with Camera Raw preferences set for JPEG/TIFF.
2. 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 don’t see it.
3. 3
   Raise the exposure of your whites

   About +2 stops is a moderate, clean glow; each stop doubles the brightness.
4. 4
   Export with HDR Output enabled

   Format JPEG, HDR Output + Maximize Compatibility, quality 90-100, 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. We tested this repeatedly. The export was correct every time – and the upload still killed it.

Why Your Glow Dies in LinkedIn’s Pipeline (and What Survives)

To understand the failure, we reverse-engineered a live glowing logo downloaded straight from LinkedIn’s CDN, inspecting it byte by byte next to our own Camera Raw export.

Our export carried its HDR in two places. First, a second hidden image inside the file – stored via MPF (Multi-Picture Format); that’s the gain map itself. Second, 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. Because ICC profiles are the one thing LinkedIn’s image pipeline preserves through re-encoding, the glow passes through untouched.

The HDR Format That Survives LinkedIn

The winning format is a color space conversion that Photoshop’s export dialogs don’t offer directly. Take the SDR image and boost only the near-white areas by about +2 stops. Convert the pixels from their original gamut (sRGB or Display P3) into Rec. 2020, then encode them with the PQ curve at an absolute luminance. The background keeps its normal brightness while the whites land at roughly 800 nits. Save the result as a progressive JPEG with the Rec2020 PQ ICC profile embedded.

The elegant part: this is progressive enhancement. On HDR screens the whites visibly exceed the interface white. On SDR screens the image looks completely normal – because any display that can’t render above-white simply clips it. The other 90% of your audience sees zero downside.

Here’s what this looks like in practice. These are real files we converted and are using on LinkedIn right now:

A headshot with near-white areas works exactly like a logo. This photo was converted with a +2 stop boost: the shirt and background exceed interface white on HDR displays, while the face stays untouched.

Note what the boost does and doesn’t touch. The conversion uses a smooth ramp on relative luminance: pixels above ~55% white get boosted, everything below keeps its normal brightness. Antialiased edges blend cleanly instead of haloing, and dark or colored backgrounds stay exactly as designed.

Do It Without Photoshop (Free Tools)

Done by hand, the conversion in Step 4 is a page of color mathematics – gamut matrices, PQ transfer functions, ICC embedding. So it’s been automated.

Ihab Salha documented the reverse-engineering in The LinkedIn HDR Logo Trick, and the conversion is now a free, open-source skill called linkedin-hdr-logo. You hand it a square, flattened logo or headshot, and it runs the conversion – numpy and Pillow under the hood – returning a finished progressive JPEG with the Rec2020 PQ ICC profile embedded. The default boost is +2 stops; you can ask for +3 for the stronger glow or +3.9 as the ceiling.

All four examples in this article were made this way – no Photoshop required. The entire pipeline runs in seconds on a laptop. For a deeper technical reference, the two standards are Ultra HDR / gain maps (ISO 21496-1) and the PQ transfer function (SMPTE ST 2084).

Verify the Glow and Keep It Tasteful

After conversion, verify before you upload: open the file on an HDR-capable display (any recent iPhone, iPad, MacBook, or a good OLED phone). The logo whites should visibly exceed the interface white. On an SDR screen it will look like a normal image – that’s expected, not a failure.

Then upload to LinkedIn as your profile photo or company logo, exactly as you would any other image. The ICC profile rides through LinkedIn’s re-encoding untouched.

A note on taste: this is a spotlight, not a floodlight. On SDR screens your image looks completely normal, which is exactly right. On HDR screens it should read as premium, not as a flashbang. Start at +2 (subtle-bright, about 800 nits). Go to +3 (about 1,600 nits) if you want the well-known glowing-logo look. Treat +3.9 (about 3,000 nits) as the practical maximum.

Is this a vanity hack? Partly. But when your profile picture is the most-seen asset you own, a detail this visible – and this rare – is real differentiation. It pairs naturally with the other profile work that compounds: maximizing your profile’s visibility, telling a story with your profile, and the tactics that earn organic reach.

The Smallest Durable Differentiator on LinkedIn

Most people scrolling LinkedIn will never know why your profile picture looks different. They’ll just notice it does. The glow is a subtle signal of craft – and because it’s invisible on standard screens, there’s zero downside for anyone else.

Here’s the whole method in five lines: prepare a square, flattened image with true whites. Skip the gain-map export – LinkedIn strips it. Encode the near-whites with the PQ curve. Embed a Rec. 2020 PQ ICC profile. Upload and let color management do the rest. One small file, one durable edge, and you’ll see it every time you open your profile on a phone.