Whether we’re talking about Nikon’s NEF, Sony’s ARW or Canon’s CRW, shooting in RAW comes with significant benefits. This professional way of shooting enables you to enjoy the best possible quality for your images, get a higher level of details and a higher level of brightness, adjust with ease overexposed or underexposed images, as well as the white balance and other metrics.
Converting RAW to JPG or other popular image format is a necessary step in case you need to send those images to a client via email, post them on social networks or photo sharing sites, upload them to your online portfolio or publish them in a blog post. RAW files tend to be 2-3 times larger than JPG files and this can have an impact not only on the space available on your hard drive, but also on your website’s speed.
In order to convert RAW photos on Mac you can resort to a wide range of programs with RAW development capabilities. In this article we’ve compiled a list of seven Mac apps which you can use to effectively make the conversion to a more common format.
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Preview
It’s not mandatory to resort from the beginning to third-party apps. Since we’re talking about Mac utilities, why not first take a look at Preview, Apple’s own image viewer and editor. Of course, this is a basic solution for basic needs since it lacks the panache and abundance of features of other programs, but it can definitely get the job done.
This is the process you have to follow in order to convert your RAW files with Preview:
- Open the photos you wish to convert in Preview
- Go to File > Export Selected Images.
- Click on the Format pop-up menu and select the preferred file type
- Enter the desired file name, choose a destination folder and click on Save.
Preview gives you the opportunity to make other changes to your images. You can resize, rotate, flip, crop or annotate them, remove the background or make standard color adjustments.
BatchPhoto
BatchPhoto is a RAW converter for Mac with batch processing capabilities. The app is designed to read RAW files from almost all DSLR manufacturers and easily convert them to a widely-used format, such as JPG, PNG or TIFF. In addition to supporting a wide range of RAW formats, the program also gives you the opportunity to tweak, according to your preferences, specific RAW development settings like Demosaicing, White Balance and Highlights.
BatchPhoto comes with a clear and easy-to-understand interface, leaving no room for confusion. The app is quite easy to use thanks to its three-step wizard structure: add your photos, apply the desired edits and select your output format and folder. Speaking of edits, this Mac tool allows you to optimize your images for web by batch renaming, resizing, rotating or cropping them. For photographers who wish to protect or market their original photography, the app lets you add customizable text and logo watermarks.
Other highlights include adding the date and time, adjusting the contrast, brightness, hue and saturation, tweaking the color balance, sharpening your pics or reducing the noise. You can also apply a large variety of special effects to your images and add vintage frames. BatchPhoto is ideal for improving your workflow, since it gives you the possibility to save your settings as Profiles and simply load them in future editing sessions.
Affinity Photo
Affinity Photo is a Mac RAW converter designed to trigger your creativity. The app comes with a multitude of options to help you retouch your images in an innovative manner and hence make your artwork stand out from the rest. When it comes to editing RAW files, the program places at your disposal a series of professional tools to help you create outstanding images.
Once you open a NEF, CRW or RAF image, you can immediately visualize its histogram and can begin making the necessary adjustments. Affinity Photo lets you tweak the contrast, exposure, clarity, vibrance, saturation or white balance, reduce the noise or perform advanced lens corrections including chromatic aberration, defringe and vignette. Once you’ve finished editing your photo, all you have to do is go to File > Export and select the preferred image format. You can choose anything you want, from JPEG and PNG to PSD and EPS.
Additionally Affinity Photo offers numerous features to perform useful operations, like removing unwanted objects from a picture, removing red-eye or retouching the skin. The app also comes packed with an impressive array of special effects such as tilt-shift, blur, glow or lighting.
Luminar
Luminar by Skylum is a powerful RAW image editor for Mac users. This is an alternative worth taking into account because it is not only rich in features, but also comes with a modern design that makes it easy to use. Luminar is a great choice for professional photographers first of all because it provides an impressive array of filters for proper RAW development. Second of all, because it has the capacity to suitably store and organize RAW and JPG images in your own library.
In order to edit and convert a RAW photo just open it in Luminar and go to the RAW Develop filter from the filter menu. This filter has three components: Adjust, Lens and Transform. The Adjust tab gives you the chance to adjust standard settings, such as the exposure, contrast, highlights and shadows or tint. The Lens tab enables you to correct any lens distortions, while the Transform tab allows you to fix other perspective problems and fix other issues, such as for instance leveling the horizon. Once you’ve obtained the look you were looking for, just go to the File menu, select Export and choose your file format.
Picktorial
Picktorial is a Mac photo editor and organizer that enables you to convert RAW to JPG or other popular format. This app comes equipped with a GPU-based RAW processing engine designed to guarantee a fast and efficient conversion process. The support for RAW files is pretty extensive, currently covering files from more than 500 digital cameras. There’s also support for DNG files, so you can use RAW images from unsupported cameras by easily converting them to DNG.
Picktorial stands out through its impressive range of options to enhance your images. The app comes with advanced tools that enable you to adjust the tones and colors of certain areas, tweak settings such as exposure, contrast, white balance, clarity, curves or saturation, remove blemishes and dust spots efficiently thanks to a powerful patching tool or clear the skin. Picktorial places at your disposal a multitude of presets to choose from and at the same time lets you create your own presets. For proper photo management, the program gives you the possibility to organize pictures by folders, set keywords or by using rating system.
Picktorial can be used as a stand-alone app or as an extension to Photos.
RAW Power
Arw Converter For Mac
RAW Power is a tool particularly developed to process RAW photos. With versions for both Mac and iPhone, the app supports files from hundreds of DSLR manufacturers, iPhone RAW files and certain DNG files (unfortunately for drone lovers DJI files are not supported at the moment). Just like in the case of Picktorial, you have the option of editing your images in a non-destructive manner directly in the stand-alone version of the app or in Photos.
RAW Power comes with a simple and clean interface that allows you to quickly familiarize yourself with how it works. The program offers powerful tools for editing RAW photos. You can perform advanced Curves adjustments, tweak the Chromatic Aberration, Perspective and Vignette, adjust the white balance using a live sampler or take advantage of the Recovery tool to properly correct the exposure exclusively on the brightest areas of the picture. Additionally you can sharpen, crop and straighten your pictures, as well as change basic settings such as the contrast, brightness or saturation.
RawTherapee
RawTherapee is an open-source RAW converter app. This cross-platform program is designed with an user-friendly interface that ensures a relatively easy navigation. Naturally, since it was particularly created for RAW development, it can read RAW files from all major digital cameras and places at your disposal a multitude of instruments to enhance and retouch your photos.
RawTherapee offers remarkable demosaicing features, which include the option of using two demosaicing algorithms on the same photo. The app allows you to perform all the corrections desired: adjust the exposure, contrast, shadow or glare, sharpen pictures or reduce the noise, tweak the vibrance and white balance. At the same time you can optimize your images by cropping, rotating and resizing them, as well as perform perspective control and distortion corrections. There’s also an option to create and save your own profiles.
Anyone who has been working with digital images has had to convert them to a particular format at a certain point. You’ve either shot your images in RAW and now need to change them to a more commonly-used format or perhaps you need to compile a PDF document from multiple pictures or you’re simply required to send or upload images in a specific format.
No matter the reason, you can easily accomplish your tasks with the aid of picture converter software. There are several tools that are particularly designed to serve conversion purposes and make the process as simple and fast as possible, by enabling batch processing.
To make your research easier we’ve compiled a list of 10 image converters for Mac, really useful when you need to switch from one format to another: Proud for mac.
BatchPhoto
Sony Arw Converter For Mac
BatchPhoto is a batch image converter that has the capacity to read and convert to more than 170 image formats. This Mac app is designed to support RAW images from the majority of DSLR cameras and ensure conversion in bulk to more popular formats like JPEG or TIFF in a single operation. Moreover, it can create PDF from multiple pictures of various formats like JPEG, TIFF, PNG or BMP so that you’ll easily share your resulting files.
Besides being able to convert multiple images at once, BatchPhoto can also resize, watermark, crop, date stamp or retouch photos in the same session. The app comes equipped with numerous features for optimizing and improving the overall appearance of your photos and it’s got the advantage of being quite intuitive. You’ll have no problems in easily finding what you need.
To help you boost productivity, BatchPhoto allows you to save your settings as Profiles and easily retrieve them later. You can save your newly-edited pictures on a local folder, upload them to Facebook, Flickr or FTP or send them via email.
GraphicConverter
GraphicConverter is one of the oldest software on the market, with its first release dating back from 1992. Throughout the years it has undergone several changes, but it has maintained its ability to efficiently convert photos. The tool can read approximately 200 types of formats and can export to around 80 different graphic formats, basically covering every need when it comes to converting.
Though the name would make you think it limits itself to image converting, GraphicConverter does more than that. It also allows you to apply various edits to optimize your pictures, like cropping, resizing or lens correction and also to get creative using a wide range of filters and effects.
EasyBatchPhoto
EasyBatchPhoto is another alternative to consider if you’re handling a large collection of photos which you want to convert. It doesn’t provide a RAW support as extensive as the previous tools, but it can read common formats like JPEG, PNG, TIFF or PSD and can write JPEG, PNG and TIFF.
In addition to image converting, the app also allows you to perform other optimization related operations, such as resizing, watermarking, cropping and rotating. The downside is that the software hasn’t received a substantial update in a couple of years.
Pixillion Image Converter
Pixillion Image Converter is an intuitive tool created to support plenty of formats, including RAW ones. It is easy to use, can read and write the most commonly-used formats, quickly process them and this is basically the app’s strong point.
Pixilion does other things as well, but in comparison to BatchPhoto and GraphicConverter it’s quite limited. You can resize, watermark or rotate your photos, but you can’t crop them, can’t perform standard image editing like adjusting the brightness, contrast or saturation and you can’t apply special effects.
Contenta RAW Converter
Contenta RAW Converter was created to help Mac users easily and quickly make the transition from RAW formats to more common ones. This app lets you convert multiple RAW photos at once, rename them, reduce their size, boost the saturation, contrast and brightness or apply artistic effects. You can also protect or brand your pictures by applying text or logo watermarks.
Contenta RAW Converter gives you the opportunity to save your current configuration for later use. This way you won’t have to go through the same converting or resizing steps and hence gain valuable time. The app also allows you to upload your photos on its server (there’s a limit of 300 images at a time) and easily share them online.
IMT Image Converter
IMT Image Converter is another proposal for converting images on Mac. The app is quite simple and does exactly what’s expected of it, that is efficiently change picture format images in bulk. In addition to converting, it can also create PDF files from multiple photos and perform basic operations like resizing, renaming and adding text and/or logo watermarks to pictures. You can also enhance your pictures by wrapping various frames and borders around them.
PhotoConvert 4
PhotoConvert 4 is an interesting Mac utility designed to ensure a simple and fast image conversion between multiple formats, including RAW ones. The process of converting images in bulk is pretty simple: add your pictures, select your preferred export options and destination folder and export them.
With PhotoConvert 4 you can perform other useful operations, such as renaming, resizing or time stamping pictures. The app has also the ability to improve the overall aspect of your images, by automatically adjusting the color level, white balance, highlights, shadows and more.
AppleMacSoft Graphic Converter
Graphic Converter by AppleMacSoft provides support for more than 50 graphic formats. These include widely-used formats like JPG, PNG or TIFF and certain RAW files from popular digital cameras.
The app is designed to be quite easy to use and to carry out the image conversion process in three simple steps. All you have to do is add your files or folder, choose the destination folder and output format and just click on the Convert button. You can’t perform other operations to optimize and improve the aspect of your images other than resizing.
Arw Converter Sony
iWinSoft Image Converter
Arw Converter To Dng
iWinSoft Image Converter is a simple app that allows you to batch convert images and that’s it. There are no other editing options available if you wish to further optimize your pictures. The app supports all popular formats, as well as RAW files from almost all DSLR manufactures, and it’s simple to use: in the main window just drag your images, select the output format and export folder and let the program process them.
Batch Image Converter
Batch Image Converter is our last proposal for converting pictures on a Mac. This is a pretty basic app that enables you to make the transition to standard image formats, like JPG, PNG or TIFF. Besides basic image converting, there’s also an option available to reduce the size of your files.
This is our list of image converters for Mac users. Which app do you use to convert images from one format to another? You can let us know in the comments below.