this has been bugging me for a while. i'll go out, get what i think is a really good shot, come home and look at it on my monitor and its just... flat. kind of grey and lifeless. then i watch random guys on youtube with the same drone and their stills look punchy and sharp and detailed. im shooting jpeg which is probably part of it but even when i tried raw once i didnt really know what to do with it in lightroom so i went back to jpeg. feel like im missing something obvious

raw is the answer but i get that lightroom can feel overwhelming at first. honestly just try dragging the texture and clarity sliders up a bit and drop the highlights, bring up the shadows a little. that alone will make a big difference. most of those youtube guys are also color grading pretty heavily even if they say they arent

also check your picture profile settings on the drone itself, sometimes its set to something like flat or d-log for video and it carries over or just makes jpegs look dull. happened to me and i spent two weeks thinking my drone was defective lmao