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Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

This has the same issue as most screenshot software, it's out of date relative to modern devices. Every Mac laptop for the last ~4 years has an HDR display. Many windows devices are also HDR. But this app doesn't capture HDR.

I tried putting up an HDR image and then capturing the screen. All HDR brightness was gone from the image.

I get it's not easy per-se. It wasn't until MacOS Tahoe that Apple's own screen capture on Mac started supporting HDR. Windows 10/11, AFAIK, only supports HDR through the XBox Game Bar's capture. Apps like ShareX still only capture SDR.

I mostly bring that up because I have apps the draw HDR and spent some time trying to find ways to add tests that we're actually getting HDR on the screen using screen captures. I hit a wall and gave up (2021).

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The readme suggests this is a Linux-first app and as HDR basically doesn’t work at all on Linux(?) I don’t think it’s very surprising that this app doesn’t handle it.

It does a great job for my purposes – describing which buttons to click over email or im.

Haven't used this app for ages, but yesterday I fine-tuned the HDR settings for my newly bought laptop under KDE/plasma, definitely on Linux. That readme might be outdated (or the tool doesn't work on KDE at all)

Yeah I think I’m a bit outdated here. But I do think Linux hdr support is weak enough that many Linux-oriented apps are unlikely to do it well

My understanding of the landscape currently is that KDE Plasma is the only major DE that supports HDR. I use it for Steam for that reason.

HDR videos and games (both native and proton) work in both KDE and Gnome (and supposedly Sway and Hyprland, but I haven't tried either). I think support in KDE/Gnome landed in a stable release ~6 months ago.

The HDR experience on KDE is about as good as the Windows one. Last time I tried Gnome, there was no way to configure SDR and HDR brightness separately, but it was definitely still usable.

The problem was not only in KDE but also in NVIDIA drivers iiuc. For my setting HDR has been stably working on KDE since early 2025.

KDE has its own native screenshot tool called spectacle that I find works as least a well, if not better, than flameshot. (No idea about HDR, though.)

Yeah, it doesn't seem to be the thing for Windows. For example its capture hotkey is PrtScrn which has been the Windows built-in capture key since approximately the Bronze Age, and then there's modifiers for whether you want to capture one window or everything, and if you really want to get fancy the Snipping Tool, all of them already built into the OS.

Honest and maybe stupid question. What does enabling HDR on Mac actually does? I have Samsung Odyssey, and turning it on for me only slightly dims the brightness of the display and rather feels uncomfortable to me personally, so I keep it off. What benefits (or drawbacks) should I expect when having it on? I spend most of my time in my terminal, my editor (GUI Emacs) and browser. I rarely have to edit photos or videos, do I still need it, I wonder.

update: turns out, for my specific case of the display model, it seems it's better to keep it off, otherwise the colors are not as vibrant.

I don't know if these are compelling. On a Mac I think they are somewhat

https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-gain-map-gallery/

Note: Pretty much all phones for the last 4-5 years take HDR images. Take a high contrast phone (sun in the background, something dark covering half the image). Then later, view in in your phone. At least on iPhone they have some "fade to bright" thing where they don't show the HDR instantly but they instead fade to HDR over 1 second or so. Once they the brightness up it will still be up for the next photo. If you get out of the photo app at some point it will reset and then the next time you look at a photos it will do the "fade to HDR" thing.

Note: that site seems to only work correctly in Chrome. In Safari, the images flicker between SDR and HDR in some semi-random way. Firefox, AFAIK, has not added any HDR support yet.

There's also this: https://threejs.org/examples/?q=hdr#webgpu_hdr

Should work on Chrome Mac/iOS, and Safari iOS. Broken on Safari MacOS.

This has been my experience as well, I've searched high and low for a screenshot software that supports HDR and found none. It's the sole reason I have HDR disabled. At least microsoft updated snipping tool now, but the usability is nothing close compared to Flameshot or Lightshot.

For what it's worth, I notice this week that the built in macOs screenshot tool will capture in HDR.

>But this app doesn't capture HDR.

When you say the Xbox game bar accounts for it, do you mean video or still images? I've had HDR disabled for some time but I remember win+shift+s on Windows 11 capturing over-exposed screenshots when playing videogames.

The Xbox Game Bar video and still images do support HDR. They were the first feature to support HDR on windows. More recently the Snipping Tool on 11 also supports HDR, but only the newer one, not the older snipping tool. If you get images in JXR (jpeg-xr) files then you have HDR, if you get over-exposed pngs/jpgs then it doesnt do HDR.

I did some Googling to discover if Qt supports HDR on MacOS. It looks like support is currently limited, but it is an area of active development.

Jan 2024: https://www.qt.io/blog/window-embedding-in-qt-quick

Sep 2025: https://forum.qt.io/topic/163224/hdr-example-code

Latest docs (search for "HDR"): https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qvideoframeformat.html

This Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ibala5/ive_discov...

... shares info about a Swift-based screen recorder that claims to support HDR. (I have no ability to verify that.) That might work for you.

What does "HDR" do in a computer screen? We're talking about high dynamic range, right?

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