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