All the digital cameras including the one in your smartphone have one or more lenses and an image sensor. The light that goes through the lens is sent to the image sensor which converts the light data into digital format that can be saved as a file. Usually in digital cameras there is processing software that processes the data coming from the image sensor and compresses it into JPEG images. But some photographers do not like the compressed images as they could lose some details. They prefer the raw data coming from the image sensor and edit it themselves on a desktop computer.
If you also like to copy the raw images from you digital camera to your PC, then you can find FastRawViewer very useful. It is a freeware image viewer that supports opening all kinds of raw image formats. The software supports all kinds of cameras including the point and shoot and the DSLR cameras. It is very fast in processing the raw images and shows a wealth of information about the raw images such as the EXIF metadata, histogram, exposure levels and more. It can be used to correct photos, including manipulating the white balance or exposure.
Any changes are immediately made to the photo using non-destructive editing methods. It saves all the changes in the XMP files which are applied the next time you view the same raw image. In addition to the raw images, it also supports JPEG, TIFF, HEIC, HEIF and PNG image file formats.
FastRawViewer does not depend on the file extensions of the image files, but it can read the image file header and determine the file type from that information. It can also preserve the EXIF metadata in the files when you are trying to export the raw images to other image file formats.
You can download FastRawViewer from https://www.fastrawviewer.com/.