okay so ive been flying for about 8 months now and i feel like my footage is decent but my photos always come out looking kind of flat and washed out especially when im shooting around midday. im using a mini 3 pro and i usually just leave everything on auto because i was scared to mess with the settings and break something lol. but my friend showed me some of his shots from basically the same locations and they look so much better and hes using the same drone.

he mentioned something about shooting in d-log or using manual exposure but honestly i got a little lost when he started explaining it. is there a good starting point for settings i should try? like do i actually need to shoot raw or is jpeg fine? i dont even know where to start with editing either, i have lightroom but ive barely touched it

yeah the midday washed out thing is super common and its mostly a lighting problem more than a settings problem honestly. the sun directly overhead is just brutal for photography in general, like harsh shadows, blown out highlights, the whole deal. if you can try shooting golden hour even just once youll immediately see the difference and wonder why you ever bothered at midday.

that said, switching to shooting RAW is probably the single biggest thing you can do. jpeg is fine for quick stuff but you basically have no room to recover anything in editing. RAW gives you so much more to work with. in lightroom just pull the highlights way down and bring the shadows up a bit and youll start to see the image pop. d-log is great but you do have to color grade it which is a whole other thing to learn, id honestly start with just RAW in normal color profile first and get comfortable with that before going down the d-log rabbit hole

i had the same problem when i started out. one thing that helped me a ton was just setting exposure compensation to like -0.3 or -0.7 so the camera isnt trying to overexpose everything. even on auto that small tweak made my shots look way less washed out right out of the camera. not a perfect fix but it helped while i was still learning the manual stuff