Convert Panasonic RW2 to JPG
RW2 from a GH, G, S or LX body — converted here, on your machine.
Options
All processing runs in your browser. No file leaves this device.
RW2 is Panasonic's RAW format, spanning the Micro Four Thirds GH and G lines, the full-frame S series, and the LX compacts. The GH bodies in particular are widely used for video, and RW2 is what they write when shooting stills or grabbing frames in photo mode.
Panasonic lenses and bodies rely heavily on in-camera correction profiles, particularly for distortion on the wider zooms. Those corrections are recorded as metadata rather than applied to the sensor data, so a RAW converter has to choose whether to honour them. If a very wide shot looks more barrel-distorted here than it did on the camera screen, that is why — the camera preview had the profile applied. The lens correction tool on this site lets you dial it in explicitly.
Multi-aspect sensors on some LX and GH models are another quirk worth knowing: those sensors are slightly larger than the recorded frame so that 4:3, 3:2 and 16:9 can all use the full diagonal. The RAW may therefore contain a marginally wider field of view than the JPEG you saw.
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
- Why does my wide-angle shot look more distorted than on the camera?
- Panasonic records lens distortion correction as metadata rather than baking it into the RAW. The camera preview and in-camera JPEG have it applied; a converter starting from the sensor data does not. Use the lens correction tool on this site to apply it deliberately.
- Does it work with files from GH-series video bodies?
- Yes. RW2 stills from any GH body decode here. Video files are a different matter — this tool handles images only.
- Are my RW2 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