ARW to PNG

PNG is the output for an ARW that is going to be worked on rather than looked at: retouched, composited, laid out for print or fed into a dataset. Every pixel the raw decode produces is kept exactly, with no JPEG artefacts to fight later. The decode runs here in your browser, from the Sony sensor data itself rather than from the preview the camera stored alongside it.

Drop ARW images here

ARW files — or any of PNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF, BMP, ICO, TIFF, GIF or camera raw (CR2, CR3, NEF, DNG, RAF, ORF, RW2). Everything runs on this device.

Or paste an image from the clipboard.

Your images never leave this device. They are decoded and re-encoded by your own browser, and the security policy on every page blocks this site from sending them anywhere.

Convert to

Lossless, keeps transparency, universally supported, larger than modern formats.

Quality

PNG is lossless — it stores every pixel exactly, so there is nothing to trade away.

Size

Images keep their original dimensions.

Rotate

Images are turned upright from their own orientation data, and left that way.

Transparency

Kept. PNG stores a full alpha channel, so cut-outs and soft edges come through exactly.

Metadata

Exif is carried across where both formats can hold it. Nothing currently in the queue has any.

Sensor detail

Decodes at the file's full resolution, interpolating missing colours when it has a colour filter array. Files already holding colour pixels need no demosaicing.

White balance

The value your camera recorded when the shutter fired — what you saw on the back of the camera.

Camera, lens, exposure and capture time are written into the PNG when those fields are present. The file details show whether GPS data exists, but coordinates are deliberately not written, and colour comes out as sRGB.

What happens to your image

File size depends mostly on the image itself.

What is preserved and what is lost converting ARW to PNG
Property	Outcome
Transparency	Preserved: ARW images have no transparency to lose.
Image quality	Preserved: Unchanged. Both formats are lossless, so every pixel comes through exactly.
Colour	Partly preserved: LibRaw develops the sensor data into eight-bit sRGB. The output uses that colour space; a source colour profile is not copied into the output.
Exif metadata	Partly preserved: When metadata is switched on, the camera, lens, exposure and capture time recorded in the raw file are assembled into a standard block and written into the PNG. Switch it off to remove them. The GPS position is shown to you in the file details and deliberately never written.
Orientation	Preserved: Applied to the pixels, and the tag is reset to upright afterwards so nothing rotates the image a second time.

Lossless after the decode, not before it

Most Sony bodies write compressed ARW by default, and that compression is not lossless: fourteen bits of sensor data are squeezed into eleven through a delta encoding across small groups of pixels. Whatever the camera discarded at that point is gone before any converter sees the file.

From the decoder onwards, nothing more is lost. LibRaw unpacks the sensor data, the picture is built from it, and the PNG stores that picture exactly. If your body offers lossless compressed or uncompressed raw, those modes are decoded the same way and simply start from more.

The PNG is eight bits per channel in sRGB, with white balance, the colour matrix and a tone curve already applied. That is a faithful, neutral picture, not a substitute for the ARW: keep the raw file if you may want to rework the exposure later.

How the picture is made

The file is identified from its bytes, then the sensor data is unpacked, the black level subtracted and the channels scaled by the white balance the camera recorded — or by one computed from the image, if you choose automatic. The Bayer mosaic is interpolated with adaptive homogeneity-directed demosaicing, the colour matrix for that Sony body maps the result to sRGB, and a standard tone curve with automatic brightening is applied.

The PNG is then encoded, reopened, decoded again and compared with the pixels that went in. A file that does not match is reported as a failure rather than offered as a download. If the sensor data cannot be decoded at all, the embedded preview is used only as a labelled fallback, and the row, the result and the ZIP manifest all say so.

File size, and when JPG is the better answer

A PNG stores three full channels for every pixel and cannot discard noise or fine detail, so it is usually bigger than the ARW it came from. The A7S test file this page is checked against is a 6 MB ARW at 2784 × 1872, and it becomes an 11 MB PNG. A detailed frame from a 42- or 61-megapixel A7R is far larger again.

For sharing, uploading or viewing, the ARW to JPG page produces a file a fraction of the size that looks the same on a screen. Half resolution is the other lever: it skips interpolation, needs a quarter of the memory and produces a quarter of the pixels.

If something goes wrong

"The sensor data in this file could not be decoded."

A camera or compression mode newer than this decoder, an incomplete copy, or a damaged file.

What to do: Copy the file from the card again if it may be incomplete. For a body newer than this build, Adobe's free DNG Converter writes a DNG that converts here.

The PNG looks flatter than the image on the camera.

The camera's screen shows a JPEG made with Sony's Creative Style. None is applied here — only the camera matrix and a standard tone curve.

What to do: Expected. A neutral, lossless starting point is what PNG output is for; add contrast and colour in the editor you hand it to.

A large A7R file is converted at half resolution.

A full-resolution demosaic of a high-megapixel frame needs hundreds of megabytes of working memory, worked out from the real sensor size before anything is allocated. When that is more than this browser can be relied on to give, the file is decoded at half resolution rather than attempted and lost.

What to do: The row says when this has happened. On a desktop, converting the large files on their own, rather than alongside others, leaves each one more room.

Questions

Is the PNG sixteen-bit?

No. Everything after the decoder in this tool, including resizing, works at eight bits per channel, so a sixteen-bit PNG would only be padding. If you need sixteen-bit output for heavy editing, use a raw editor for that step.

Does the PNG keep the camera and lens details?

With metadata on, the body, lens, exposure and capture time are read from Sony's maker notes and written into the PNG as an Exif block. GPS coordinates are shown in the file details and never written. Some older programs do not read Exif from PNG at all.

Can I convert a whole card of ARW files?

Yes. Add them all and the queue decodes as many at once as the device's memory allows, with real progress per file. Download them one at a time or as a ZIP with a manifest recording which camera each came from.