RAW to JPG Converter (CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG)

About the RAW to JPG Converter (CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG)

Every camera RAW file also holds a finished JPEG picture — the one the camera shows on its screen, with its own colours, white balance and picture style. This converter finds that JPEG inside Canon CR2 and CR3, Nikon NEF and NRW, Sony ARW, Adobe DNG, Olympus/OM System ORF, Fujifilm RAF, Panasonic RW2, Pentax PEF, Samsung SRW and other RAW files and saves it in seconds: byte for byte (no quality loss), or turned upright and resized as JPG or PNG. Camera, lens, exposure and date go along in the file; the location does not.

It does not develop the sensor data — no RAW editing, exposure or white-balance changes — so what you get is exactly the camera’s JPEG, at the size the camera stored it. Many cameras store a full-size JPEG; some store a smaller one, and the page tells you which for each file. Nothing is uploaded.

Common uses

• Sharing or posting photos straight from a card that was shot in RAW only.
• Looking through RAW files on a phone, tablet or work computer without RAW software.
• Quickly culling a shoot: pull every JPEG out, keep the best, develop only those.
• Getting a picture out of a RAW file from a camera your editor does not support yet.

How large is the JPEG inside a RAW file?

It depends on the camera and sometimes its settings. In the sample files we tested, these held a full-size JPEG: Canon EOS 80D (CR2), EOS 90D and R6 (CR3), Pentax K-70 and K10D, Samsung NX500, Nikon COOLPIX P1000 and Apple iPhone 12 Pro (ProRAW DNG). These held a smaller one: Sony α7 III and α7S (1616 × 1080), Nikon D850 and Z 6 (about two thirds of the RAW image’s width), Olympus E-3 and OM System OM-1 (1600 × 1200 and 3200 × 2400), Panasonic G9 (1920 × 1440), Fujifilm X-T3 (4416 × 2944) and Canon EOS 40D (1936 × 1288). The page shows what each of your files holds and says when it is smaller than the camera’s full image.

Camera JPEG or upright JPG?

• Camera JPEG copies the stored JPEG unchanged, so there is no second compression. The camera details are written into it as Exif, with the orientation tag that tells viewers which way is up (cameras store the preview unrotated).
• JPG, upright turns the pixels the right way round and saves a new JPG at the quality you set — useful for programs that ignore the orientation tag, or to make the file smaller with Longest side.
• PNG saves the same upright picture losslessly; the files are large.

With Keep camera details off, the saved file holds no metadata at all except, for sideways photos, the orientation.

How it works

The file is searched for complete JPEG pictures — following the marker structure of the JPEG standard, which rules out the lossless-JPEG sensor data in CR2 and DNG files — and the largest is kept. Camera details come from the RAW file’s TIFF and Exif directories — most RAW formats are built on TIFF; DNG, for example, is an extension of TIFF 6.0 (see the Library of Congress description of DNG) — or, in CR3 files, from the boxes that hold the same directories. Everything runs in your browser.

Limitations

• No RAW development: exposure, white balance, highlight recovery and noise reduction need a RAW editor. The picture is the camera’s own JPEG.
• Files with no embedded JPEG (some DNG files made by converters and editors) cannot be converted here.
• Sigma X3F, Minolta MRW and other uncommon formats work only when they contain a standard JPEG preview.
• Up to 100 files at a time, each up to 400 MB.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.