Convert Nikon NEF to JPG
NEF from a D850, a D750, a Z6 or a Z9 — dropped in here, decoded here.
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All processing runs in your browser. No file leaves this device.
NEF stands for Nikon Electronic Format and covers everything from the early D-series DSLRs through the current Z mirrorless line. Nikon offers several bit depths and compression schemes within it — 12-bit or 14-bit capture, and uncompressed, lossless compressed, or lossy compressed storage. All of them are still .nef, which is why two files from the same camera can differ in size by a factor of two.
One case worth flagging: the High Efficiency RAW modes on the Z8 and Z9 (labelled HE and HE*) use a different compression scheme inside the NEF container. Support for those arrived in LibRaw considerably later than for conventional NEF, and very new camera bodies in general are the most likely thing to fail here. If a file will not decode, that is the usual reason — and the general RAW page has the same limitation, since it is a property of the decoder rather than of this page.
Nikon also uses .nrw, a related format from some Coolpix compacts. Those are accepted here too.
What happens on conversion: LibRaw demosaics the sensor mosaic with adaptive homogeneity-directed interpolation, applies the white balance your camera recorded at capture, and hands back 16-bit linear data. That linear buffer is then encoded to sRGB — the gamma encoding every display expects, applied correctly rather than approximated. Because the whole path stays in floating point until the final encode, there is no intermediate 8-bit step to quantise away highlight detail.
Your files never leave this device. The decoder runs as WebAssembly inside this page, so there is no upload step and no server that could retain a copy. With RAW this is not just a privacy point — it is why the tool is usable at all, since uploading a card full of 30 MB files over a home connection would take longer than the shoot did.
Common questions
- Does it support 12-bit and 14-bit NEF, compressed and uncompressed?
- Yes, all the conventional variants decode. The exception to watch is the High Efficiency (HE / HE*) modes on the Z8 and Z9, which use a newer compression scheme that only recent decoder builds handle.
- Why is my NEF from a brand-new Nikon body not opening?
- Support for a new sensor has to be added to LibRaw after the camera ships, typically some months later. This is the most common reason a RAW file fails to decode, and it affects every converter built on the same library.
- Are my NEF files uploaded to a server?
- No. Decoding and encoding both run in your browser via WebAssembly. Nothing is transmitted. You can verify it in the Network tab of your devtools during a batch, or by disconnecting from the internet once the page has loaded — the tool keeps working.
- How many files can I convert at once?
- There is no limit in the tool. RAW files are large, and each one is decoded to a full floating-point buffer, so memory is the real constraint. Batches of a few dozen are comfortable on a typical laptop; for a whole card, work through it in groups rather than dropping a thousand files at once.
This converter is part of a full editing pipeline — tone, colour, lens correction and batch export all run the same way, without uploading.
Open the full pipeline