RAW to JPEG

Turn a camera RAW file into something you can actually send someone. No account, no watermark.

Select a RAW file

Click to select or drag and drop
CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2, PEF, DNG, X3F — up to 256 MB

White balance

As shot Auto

"As shot" uses the setting your camera recorded — almost always what you want. "Auto" re-computes it, which can rescue a frame shot under the wrong preset.

Size

Full resolution Half (much faster)

JPEG quality — 92

What a RAW file actually is

A RAW file is not an image. It is the sensor's unprocessed readout — one brightness value per photosite, each sitting behind a red, green or blue filter in a repeating mosaic. Turning that into a picture requires demosaicing: reconstructing the two missing colour channels at every pixel by interpolating from neighbours. Then white balance, colour-matrix conversion, gamma and sharpening are applied.

That processing is why RAW files look flat and dark in software that doesn't understand them, and why every camera maker's RAW is a different format with its own extension.

Why nothing opens them

Canon CR2 and CR3, Nikon NEF, Sony ARW, Fujifilm RAF, Olympus ORF, Panasonic RW2 — each is proprietary, each changes between camera generations, and support is reverse-engineered. A brand-new camera body typically cannot be read by anything for months after release. Adobe's DNG exists to solve exactly this and has not been widely adopted by manufacturers.

This is a conversion, not an edit

The point of shooting RAW is the latitude to recover highlights, lift shadows and correct colour before the image is baked. This tool does none of that — it applies a neutral, standard development and hands you a JPEG. If the frame needs rescuing, use Lightroom, Capture One, or the free darktable or RawTherapee, all of which will do a far better job than any one-click conversion.

What this is for: you have a RAW, you need a JPEG to email or upload, and you don't want to install a 2 GB application to get one.

The embedded preview

Most RAW files contain a full-size JPEG preview generated by the camera, which includes whatever picture style was set. Some converters just extract that — it is instant, and it matches what you saw on the camera's screen. This tool demosaics properly instead, which is slower but gives a neutral result at full sensor resolution rather than the camera's interpretation.

Unsupported cameras

If your file is refused, the decoder probably doesn't know your camera body yet — this happens with recent releases. Converting to DNG first with Adobe's free DNG Converter usually gets around it, because DNG is a documented format.