this is kind of an embarrassing question but here goes. ive watched probably a dozen youtube tutorials on editing drone footage and photos in lightroom and every single time i try to follow along my photos end up looking worse than when i started. like overly saturated, fake looking, HDR-ish in a bad way. the before and after in the tutorials always looks amazing but when i do the exact same sliders mine just looks like a bad instagram filter from 2012.

i shoot jpeg mostly which someone told me recently might be the issue because lightroom apparently works a lot better with raw files. could that really make that big of a difference? the jpegs straight out of the drone honestly look pretty nice already, kind of warm and punchy, so part of me wonders if i even need to edit them at all or if im just editing them because i think im supposed to

flying a dji air 3 if that matters. mostly shooting landscapes, coastline stuff, that kind of thing

yeah the jpeg vs raw thing is genuinely huge and its not just marketing. when you shoot jpeg the drone is already applying its own processing - sharpening, contrast, color profile, noise reduction - and then when you go ham with lightroom sliders on top of that you're basically double processing it and it falls apart fast. raw files are flat and kind of ugly straight out of camera on purpose because all that latitude is preserved for you to work with in post.

that said if your jpegs already look good to you theres zero shame in just using them as-is or doing very minimal adjustments. not every photo needs to be heavily edited. i'd suggest switching to raw just to try it and see if it changes your editing experience - even if you decide to go back to jpeg at least you'll understand why the edits were behaving weird

honestly i went through the same thing and what helped me was stopping trying to copy tutorial edits and just... developing my own eye for what looks good. a lot of those youtube drone editing videos are going for this super punchy oversaturated look that's trendy right now but it doesnt actually look realistic. for coastal landscape stuff especially i'd keep the edits really subtle - maybe just pull back the highlights a bit, lift the shadows slightly, and leave the colors mostly alone. the air 3 has really nice color science already and sometimes less really is more. the raw thing is true though, definitely worth switching