ORF to AVIF Converter

ORF vs AVIF — What Actually Changes When You Convert

ORF is the Olympus Raw Format: an undemosaiced sensor readout that no browser, phone or CMS can display without a raw renderer. AVIF is the AV1 Image File Format — a finished, heavily compressed delivery image that almost every current browser draws natively. Converting between them is not a format swap so much as a development step: the raw is rendered once, the white balance and exposure are baked in, and what comes out is an export. The short answer on which to keep: the .orf stays as your negative, the AVIF is the copy you publish.

Side-by-side Comparison

When AVIF Is the Right Target

• You are publishing finished photographs to the web and page weight matters — AVIF is where AV1's intra-frame coding pays off most.
• Your audience is on current browsers. Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge have all shipped support, and caniuse puts the combined figure just under 95%.
• You want one delivery file rather than a JPEG plus a WebP plus a retina variant.
• The image has smooth gradients — skies, studio backdrops, out-of-focus backgrounds — where JPEG's block artefacts and banding show up first.

When to Pick JPG or TIFF Instead

• Something in the chain is old. Email clients, print-lab uploaders, e-commerce back ends and legacy CMS installs still reject AVIF routinely — ORF to JPG is the universally safe delivery copy.
• You are heading to print or to further editing and want a high-bit-depth, non-lossy intermediate; ORF to TIFF keeps far more room to work.
• You need transparency layers or a working file with alpha, which a raw photograph does not have and this conversion cannot invent.
• You are archiving. Keep the .orf itself for that — a lossy delivery format is never the archive copy.

How to Convert ORF to AVIF

1. Upload Your ORF Files: Drag and drop the Olympus .orf files onto the page or click "Add Files". Several photos can be queued and converted with the same settings.
2. Set the Quality Preset: Under Image Compression, Quality Preset runs from Highest to Lowest and starts on "Very High (Recommended)". Each rung maps to a specific encoder quality value — the table below shows which.
3. Or set a Specific file size: Switch Image Compression to "Specific file size", type a number and pick Bytes, Kilobytes or Megabytes. Turning on Auto Scale lets the converter reduce the pixel dimensions as well as the quality when the target is too tight to hit otherwise.
4. Convert and Download: Adjust Image resolution if you want something smaller than native, then click Convert. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are processed on our servers, and are deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

What the Quality Preset Actually Sets

Every rung of the dropdown resolves to a single quality number handed to the AVIF encoder. There is no separate lossless switch, bit-depth selector, compression-level or compression-speed control on this page — those belong to other image targets and do not render here — so the preset and the resolution settings are the whole of your control surface.

Image resolution sits alongside it with "Keep original", a percentage, a preset height, an explicit Width, an explicit Height, or Width × Height. "Keep original" means exactly that on this page — the render is written at the raw file's native pixel dimensions, with no cap applied. Resolution is the blunter but more effective lever if a preset alone will not get you small enough: halving the pixel dimensions removes three-quarters of the pixels before the encoder even starts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I lose the raw editing latitude by converting ORF to AVIF?

Yes, in the converted copy. An ORF holds an undemosaiced sensor readout — typically 12 bits per pixel on Olympus and OM System bodies — which is why white balance, exposure and highlight recovery are still adjustable long after the shutter fired. Producing a viewable image means demosaicing it and committing to those decisions. Render once, keep the original .orf as your negative. If your camera also wrote a matching .ori file, that is an in-camera edited variant — convert from the .orf for the full raw data.

Why are there no Lossless or Bit Depth options on this page?

Because they are not part of the AVIF surface here. Lossless mode, bit depth, compression level and compression speed appear on other image targets — they are controls this converter exposes for PNG and WebP output — but on an AVIF target none of them render. What you get instead is the Quality Preset, a Specific file size mode with Auto Scale, and the Image resolution group. If you need a genuinely lossless export from the raw, ORF to TIFF or ORF to PNG are the pages for that.

Will the AVIF be at my camera's full resolution?

Yes, unless you ask otherwise. With Image resolution on "Keep original" the file is written at the raw's native pixel dimensions — there is no ceiling applied on this conversion. Set a percentage, a preset, a width, a height or an explicit width × height when you want something smaller, or turn on Auto Scale under "Specific file size" and let the converter shrink the dimensions to reach a size target.

How much smaller will the AVIF be than the ORF?

Substantially, though the exact ratio depends entirely on the photograph and the preset. The comparison is not really like for like: an ORF stores full-depth sensor data plus embedded previews and metadata and commonly runs into the tens of megabytes, while an AVIF stores a rendered picture with a lossy codec designed for delivery. A more useful comparison is against a JPEG of the same render, where AVIF's intra-frame AV1 coding is what buys you the reduction. If you need a guaranteed number rather than an estimate, use the "Specific file size" mode and state it.

Will my Olympus Art Filter or picture mode carry into the AVIF?

Not reliably. An ORF records the sensor data plus the camera's settings, but an Art Filter or in-camera colour profile is a rendering instruction that Olympus's own pipeline executes, and third-party raw renderers approximate it at best. If matching the in-camera look matters, apply the edit in software that reads ORF, export a finished image, and convert that instead of the raw file.

Where will the AVIF actually display once I have converted it?

In essentially every current browser. caniuse currently puts AVIF at 94.67% of global traffic, with support in Chrome from version 85, Firefox from 93, Safari from 16.4 and Edge from 121, and most modern image viewers and design tools now read it too. The gaps are in older software rather than older hardware: legacy email clients, some print-lab uploaders and older CMS installs still refuse it. Serve AVIF with a JPEG fallback if your audience is mixed.

Does AVIF handle transparency, and does that matter for a raw photo?

AVIF does support an alpha channel, but it is irrelevant here — a raw photograph is a fully opaque rectangle of sensor data, so there is nothing transparent to preserve and no background colour control renders on this page. Transparency only becomes relevant when your source already has it, which is why alpha and matte settings appear on PNG and WebP conversions rather than on a raw import.

Can I convert an AVIF back to ORF?

No, and no software can. A raw file records what one specific sensor measured through its own colour filter array, alongside the camera's metadata; once that has been demosaiced into RGB pixels and compressed, there is nothing left to reconstruct it from. ORF is an input-only format for that reason. Keep the originals — that is the only copy that can be re-rendered differently later.

How are my files handled during conversion?

Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, rendered and encoded on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public. The practical constraint is upload size and time, since Olympus raw files routinely run into the tens of megabytes each.