been staring at this for two days and im losing my mind a little. ran a grid mission over a pretty large field, around 180 acres, 75% front and side overlap, 120m AGL. the resulting orthomosaic looks fine mostly but there's this diagonal-ish seam or line running through roughly the center of the map where the lighting on one side is noticeably different from the other. like two different exposures got stitched together.

i know i had auto exposure on during the flight which i've seen some people say is a problem but I didnt think it would be this bad. the flight was in the morning and the sun was moving obviously so maybe that's it. processing was done in DroneDeploy, didn't change any of the default settings.

is there a way to fix this in post or do i need to reshoot with manual exposure. the client kind of needs this by end of week so a reshoot isnt ideal but if thats the only real fix ill deal with it.

yeah this is almost definitely the auto exposure thing. when youre flying a mission that long the camera is adjusting throughout and when the software tries to stitch those images together you get exactly what youre describing, that visible seam where the exposure changed. for anything larger than maybe 50 acres i always lock exposure before the mission starts, let the camera meter on a mid-tone area and then just lock it there. it's one of those things nobody really tells you when youre starting out but it makes a huge difference.

as for fixing it in post, sort of. if you process in something like Lightroom or Capture One first and try to even out the exposure across all the images before running them through DroneDeploy it can help but its tedious and honestly the results are usually mediocre. for end of week i'd probably just deliver it and note it as a known artifact and reshoot when you can, assuming the client doesnt need pixel perfect accuracy for this particular job.

What camera are you using? I ask because some of the older Mavic cameras have a harder time with this than the newer ones even with manual exposure set. Also 120m might be a bit high depending on the GSD you're targeting, though that probably wouldnt cause the seam issue specifically just wondering what your setup is