PEF to AVIF Converter

PEF vs AVIF — Which One Should You Keep, and Which Should You Ship?

A Pentax .pef and an .avif are answers to two completely different questions. PEF is a negative: TIFF-based sensor data at 12 or 14 bits per channel, meant to be worked on. AVIF is a delivery print: an AV1-coded picture built to be small, sharp and fast to load. The short answer, if you are here for one, is keep the PEF as the master and convert a copy to AVIF whenever the file is going onto a page, into an app, or to someone who just needs to look at it.

Side-by-side Comparison

When to Stay on PEF

• You still intend to adjust white balance, exposure or highlight recovery — those only exist while the file is raw.
• You are archiving. A raw file plus its metadata is the most complete record of what the sensor saw, and no delivery format recovers it.
• You are handing the frame to a retoucher or a print lab that asked for raw, or for a TIFF with its Compression Type set to LZW rather than the lossy default.
• Your Pentax body was set to write in-camera DNG rather than PEF. The sensor data is the same either way; use the DNG converter for those files.

When to Convert to AVIF

• The picture is going on a web page, into a mobile app, or into any place where transfer size is the cost that matters.
• You want modern compression without JPEG's blocking. AVIF's artefacts read as softening rather than the visible 8×8 blocks JPEG produces across skies and gradients.
• You need a small file that still holds fine texture — foliage, fabric, hair — where JPEG at the same size would smear.
• Your audience is on current browsers. If it isn't, PEF to JPG opens absolutely everywhere and is the safer hand-off.

How to Convert PEF to AVIF

1. Upload Your PEF File: Drop your .pef files onto the page or pick them with the file browser. Several raw frames can be queued and converted with identical settings.
2. Pick a Quality Preset: The "Quality Preset" mode is selected by default and opens on "Very High (Recommended)". The ladder runs Highest, Very High, High, Medium, Low, Very Low, Lowest, and it maps straight onto the AVIF encoder's quality value.
3. Or Set a Specific File Size: Switch to "Specific file size", type a target in bytes, kilobytes or megabytes, and optionally enable "Auto Scale" so the converter is also allowed to reduce dimensions to reach the number.
4. Adjust Image Resolution and Download: Leave "Image resolution" on "Keep original", or choose a percentage, a height preset from 16P up to 4320p (8K), or an explicit width and height. Then click Convert. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark.

What Each Quality Preset Actually Sends the Encoder

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I lose my Pentax raw editing latitude by converting PEF to AVIF?

Completely, and that is the whole point of the trade. A PEF stores 12 or 14 bits per channel of largely unprocessed sensor readout, so exposure, white balance and highlight recovery are still live decisions. Writing an AVIF requires demosaicing that data and committing to one interpretation. Make your raw adjustments first, convert the result, and keep the original .pef as the master you can always go back to.

Is AVIF really smaller than JPEG for a photograph?

For the same perceived quality, generally yes — AOMedia's own specification page cites savings of over 50% against JPEG and over 30% against WebP. The gain is largest on the kind of content a Pentax sensor produces: broad gradients, out-of-focus backgrounds and fine natural texture. It is smallest on images that are already tiny or already heavily compressed, where there is little redundancy left to remove.

Which browsers and apps can actually open an AVIF file?

Per caniuse, AVIF is supported in Chrome from version 85, Firefox from 93, Safari from 16.4, Edge from 121 and Opera from 71, which adds up to roughly 95% of tracked browser usage. Desktop application support is patchier than browser support — recent macOS and Windows builds, GIMP and current Adobe releases handle it, but plenty of older viewers and utilities still do not. If the recipient's software is unknown, PEF to JPG removes the guesswork.

How does the "Specific file size" option hit an exact number?

By re-encoding and measuring. The converter renders the raw, encodes it, compares the result against your target, and then binary-searches the quality value until it finds the highest setting that still fits. With "Auto Scale" enabled it is also allowed to reduce the pixel dimensions as part of that search. If even the lowest quality still exceeds your target, you get the smallest file the encoder could produce rather than a failure.

Does this page let me choose lossless AVIF, a compression speed, or a bit depth?

No. The AVIF format itself supports lossless mode, 10- and 12-bit colour and speed tuning, but this page exposes only the quality controls and the resolution controls — a quality preset, an exact target size, and the resize options. Treat the output as a standard-range delivery copy. If you need a raster master you can keep editing, render to PEF to TIFF and switch its Compression Type to LZW — the default there is JPEG, which is lossy.

Should I convert PEF to AVIF or to WebP?

AVIF usually wins on file size at equal quality, and it handles gradients and wide tonal range better, which suits landscape and portrait work from a Pentax body. WebP wins on reach and on encode speed, and it is understood by a longer tail of older software. A practical pattern is AVIF as the primary asset with a WebP or JPEG fallback; PEF to WebP produces the fallback from the same raw.

Is AVIF the same thing as AV1?

They share a codec but not a purpose. AV1 is the Alliance for Open Media's video codec; AVIF applies the same intra-frame coding tools to a single still image and stores it in an ISO base media container. That shared ancestry is why AVIF compresses so well. If you actually want a video clip out of a Pentax frame rather than a picture, PEF to AV1 is the page for that.

Will EXIF data like shutter speed and lens survive the conversion?

Do not count on it. AVIF can carry EXIF, but a raw-to-delivery render is a re-authoring step rather than a copy, and metadata handling varies with the settings applied. If shooting data matters for cataloguing, keep the .pef — it holds the original EXIF and Pentax maker notes intact — and treat the AVIF purely as an output.

What happens to my raw file after the conversion?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, rendered and encoded on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. There is no sign-up, no watermark, and nothing is shared or made public. The practical limit on large batches is upload size and time, since Pentax raw frames commonly run tens of megabytes each.