okay so this has been driving me crazy for two days now. flew a site last tuesday, pretty standard grid mission, 75/75 overlap, M2P with the stock camera. processed it in dronedeploy and theres this really obvious seam kind of diagonally through the middle of the map where the lighting is just noticeably different on each side. the whole thing looks like two photos stitched by someone who didnt care

conditions werent perfect i'll admit, there was some broken cloud cover and i think the light changed between the first and second pass but i didnt think it would be this bad. ive flown in similar conditions before and it came out fine. tried reprocessing it twice already same result

is this just a lost cause or is there some way to fix it in post, like in lightroom before reprocessing or something? or do i have to reshoot the whole thing

yeah thats a lighting change artifact, classic. broken clouds are the enemy of good orthomosaics because the algorithm tries to color balance across images that were literally taken in different lighting conditions and it shows exactly like what youre describing. the diagonal seam is usually where your flight lines switched direction and the time gap was long enough for the light to shift

you can try running the images through something like lightroom or even just the adobe camera raw batch editor to normalize the exposure before reprocessing. make sure you're doing it by flight line not just globally or you might make it worse. theres also a color balancing option in the dronedeploy processing settings, try setting it to radiometric correction if you havent already though with the stock M2P camera i dont know how much that'll help without a proper calibration panel

honestly though if the client needs it looking clean you might just have to reshoot on an overcast day, flat diffuse light is your friend for this stuff

had the exact same thing happen to me last spring, almost identical situation. what i ended up doing was just being upfront with the client that the conditions werent ideal and reflew it early morning before the clouds came in. the 6am light is flat and boring but the map looked perfect. sometimes theres no clever fix, the data just isnt there