One UI 7 lets you stop HDR photos from making your screen super bright

Andy Walker / Android Authority

To fully appreciate the benefits of HDR photography, you need to have a device with an HDR-capable display. When viewed on such a display, HDR photos reveal greater detail in both the highlights and shadows. However, accurately reproducing this extended dynamic range often requires the display to significantly increase its brightness. This sudden shift in brightness can be jarring, especially when browsing social media at night. As a result, some users have been looking for ways to temporarily stop their Android phones from displaying HDR content, but the Android OS doesn’t offer such an option. Samsung is thankfully addressing this issue on its own in its upcoming One UI 7 update for Galaxy devices.

While digging through the One UI 7 beta release for the Galaxy S24, we discovered that Samsung had relocated the “Super HDR” toggle. Instead of being tucked within the Samsung Gallery app’s settings, “Super HDR” is now found under Settings > Advanced features in One UI 7. The description of the “Super HDR” toggle remains unchanged in One UI 7, still stating that it “automatically adjust[s] the display to show the full range of colors and contrast in pictures taken with Galaxy devices.”

In One UI 6.1.1 and earlier, disabling the “Super HDR” toggle only prevented One UI from adjusting the display’s brightness when viewing HDR photos within the Samsung Gallery app. With the “Super HDR” toggle now located in the general Settings app, we reasoned that it would now work system-wide. This was confirmed by three beta testers. One of those testers, Reddit user FragmentedChicken, even shared a brief video demonstrating the new behavior of the “Super HDR” toggle in One UI 7.

The reason that turning off “Super HDR” affects apps like Instagram and Threads is that Samsung’s “Super HDR” feature internally uses Google’s Ultra HDR image format. Ultra HDR is Google’s effort to create a universally supported HDR image format. Introduced in Android 14 and built on the JPEG format, it functions on virtually any device or platform, regardless of their display capabilities. Devices and platforms that don’t recognize the HDR metadata will display the SDR version of the image, while those that do will display the intended HDR version.

Therefore, because both Instagram and Threads support Ultra HDR images, Galaxy devices with “Super HDR” enabled can view Ultra HDR content uploaded to either platform. Consequently, disabling “Super HDR” in settings disables support for viewing this HDR content, preventing the screen from brightening. If you have a Galaxy phone or tablet and want a more comfortable social media browsing experience at night, consider toggling off “Super HDR” under Settings > Advanced features once your device receives the One UI 7 update.

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