ok this has been bugging me forever. when im flying and i look at the live feed the shot looks amazing, great exposure, colors pop, everything lined up perfectly. then i get home and pull the sd card and the actual raw files look so dull and flat compared to what i saw. im shooting in raw+jpeg and the jpegs look closer to what i saw but still not the same. is this just how it works or am i doing something wrong with my settings

been at this for like 3 months so probably missing something obvious

yeah this is totally normal, the screen preview is basically showing you a processed jpeg version in realtime with all the drone's picture settings applied. the raw file is intentionally flat because it has all the data preserved for you to grade yourself. took me forever to figure this out when i started. if you just want it to look good without editing just shoot jpeg only honestly

what drone are you on? some of them have a D-log or similar flat profile selected by default even for the preview and thats whats making the raws look weird when you open them on a monitor that isnt calibrated. could be a profile mismatch thing