.raw as a generic extension is used by Leica, Panasonic and others; identify the maker from the EXIF, not the extension. That is the short version; the rest of this page is what we tell people who send us one.
The structure, briefly
A raw file holds the un-demosaiced sensor readout plus a camera profile, so the same photo can be re-white-balanced years later without quality loss.
The .raw extension is shared by Leica, Panasonic and several other makers, so the camera has to be read from the EXIF maker note — the file name identifies nothing.
Spotting a renamed file
There is no fixed signature at the head of this one, so identification means reading the structure instead: Raw files are usually TIFF-based (II* or MM x2a) or carry a manufacturer-specific header; there is no single .raw signature.
What reads this format
Installed options: Adobe Camera Raw / Lightroom, Capture One, Darktable (free), RawTherapee (free), IrfanView (with the RawPlugin), Microsoft Photos (with the Raw extension). None of them have to be the program that made the file: Universal Viewer reads it and writes nothing back.
Converting .raw to something usable
The targets people actually ask for are .dng, .jpg, .png, .tif, .tiff. Each one has its own page with the settings that matter: raw → dng, raw → jpg, raw → png, raw → tif, raw → tiff
Questions we get about this one
Can I convert .raw without the original program?
For the targets listed above, yes. The container survives; what is lost is whatever the target format cannot hold.
What opens .raw if I do not have Camera?
Adobe Camera Raw / Lightroom, Capture One, Darktable (free). If nothing installed reads it, the viewer above does.
M. Halvorsen re-read this on 2026-10-05.
Notes from the file library
Files of this kind are catalogued with the family named in the table above. The family groups them by what a file carries, not by the application that wrote it, which is why two extensions from the same application can sit in different families.
Two things decide whether a file can be opened on a machine that never had the application that made it: the header, which says what the container is, and the structure behind it, which says whether the contents can be read at all. The conversion guides listed on the page cover the targets that come up most often.
Format pages are rebuilt with each release of the toolset, and the review line at the bottom of the page is when an editor last checked the entry against a file. If a page disagrees with a file you have, send the first sixteen bytes and the build number to the support address and the entry is corrected in the next build.