ok so ive been flying for about 8 months now and my footage looks decent but my photos just keep coming out really flat and washed out especially when theres any kind of bright sky involved. im shooting in auto most of the time which i know is probably the issue but every time i try to go manual i either blow out the sky completely or the ground goes super dark and muddy.

a friend told me to shoot in d-log or whatever the flat color profile is called on the mini 3 but then when i looked at those photos they looked even worse lol. maybe im just not editing them right after? i have lightroom but honestly barely use it beyond basic exposure sliders. any tips would be really appreciated because i see some peoples shots online and theyre stunning and mine just look like screenshots

the d-log thing makes sense but yeah it absolutely needs editing after, you cant just look at a d-log file and expect it to look good straight out of camera - thats kind of the whole point of it, its giving you more data to work with in post. if you dont want to deal with that workflow honestly just shoot in normal color profile but drop your sharpness and saturation a tiny bit in the camera settings, youll get a more workable file without needing to do heavy edits.

the bigger thing for blown out skies is using an ND filter and actually nailing your exposure manually. a lot of people skip ND filters and then wonder why the sky is toast. for bright midday sun im usually on an ND16 or ND64 depending on conditions. also try using the histogram instead of just eyeballing the screen - once you get used to reading it, overexposed shots become way less common.

same boat as you a few months ago honestly. what helped me a ton was just watching a youtube video specifically about lightroom for drone photos, not generic lightroom stuff. theres some guys who do full edits from start to finish with aerial shots and you can kinda see what sliders actually matter. the dehaze tool in lightroom is weirdly good for making drone shots pop btw, i overuse it probably but still