so ive been flying for about 8 months now and i feel like my footage and photos still look kind of... blah? like technically they're sharp and exposed okay but there's just no punch to them. i shoot in auto most of the time which i know is probably the issue but whenever i switch to manual i mess up the exposure and end up with either blown out sky or really dark ground.

i was watching some youtube videos and everyone talks about shooting in d-log or flat profiles but honestly i tried that once and my footage looked so washed out i panicked and switched back. do you actually need to color grade everything? is that just the norm now? feels like a lot of work for casual shots

also not sure if my compositions are just bad or if it's the settings. hard to tell which problem to fix first

yeah the flat/log profiles thing threw me off too when i first tried it. you basically have to do at least a basic grade or it looks terrible straight out of the drone, that's just how it works. but here's the thing ? you dont have to go crazy with it. even just pulling the contrast up a little, boosting saturation slightly and doing a subtle s-curve in lightroom or whatever you use makes a massive difference. takes like 2 minutes once you get used to it.

for the exposure issue in manual, try locking your ISO as low as it'll go (64 on the mini 3 i think?) and then use the ND filters to control your shutter speed. the 180 degree rule thing ? shutter speed double your frame rate ? is worth actually following, it makes motion look way more natural. once i started doing that my footage stopped looking so sterile.

honestly your composition thing is probably also worth looking at separately. try the really high altitude straight down shots, those almost always look interesting because people arent used to seeing things from directly above. low slow pulls backward over something with a foreground element also works really well and doesnt require perfect settings to look good.

im in basically the same boat lol, been at it about 6 months. one thing that actually helped me a ton was just forcing myself to fly golden hour even when its inconvenient. like the light does so much of the work for you that even mediocre settings look pretty nice. my shots from midday still look kind of flat but the evening ones always get way more attention when i post them.