so ive been flying for about 8 months now and my photos still look terrible when its really sunny out. like everything just looks blown out and flat, no contrast at all. i shoot in auto mostly because i havent really messed with manual settings yet and honestly its a bit intimidating

i have a mini 3 pro and i know it has decent camera specs but i feel like my photos look worse than stuff i see people posting here with way cheaper drones. is there some basic setting im missing or is this just a learning curve thing

also should i be shooting in raw or does jpeg work fine for beginners? i feel like every thread i read says shoot raw but then i dont know what to do with the files after

the blown out highlights thing is almost always an exposure issue ? you probably need to dial down your EV compensation a bit, maybe -0.3 or even -0.7 in bright conditions. auto mode tries to average everything out and it just doesnt handle harsh sunlight well at all

for raw vs jpeg, honestly yes shoot raw even if editing feels overwhelming right now. lightroom has a free mobile version and there are tons of presets made specifically for drone footage. the main thing raw gives you is the ability to pull back those highlights after the fact ? like those blown out skies can actually be recoverable if you exposed reasonably. once you go raw you really cant go back, the jpeg files just throw away too much information

also try flying around golden hour if you can, like the hour after sunrise or before sunset. the light is just so much softer and warmer and you dont have to fight the exposure as hard. it kind of hides a lot of mistakes while you're still learning

same boat as you a few months ago tbh. what helped me was just learning one setting at a time instead of trying to understand everything at once. i started by just learning to set my ISO manually and leaving everything else on auto, then moved on from there. feels less scary that way