so ive been flying my mini 3 pro for about 4 months now and honestly the video footage looks pretty decent but my photos keep coming out really flat and overexposed when i shoot during the day. like everything just looks washed out and the sky always blows out to pure white even when i try to dial down the exposure manually.

im shooting in auto mode mostly which i know is probably part of the problem but every time i try to switch to manual i get confused about where to start. i think i had ISO at like 400 and shutter was around 1/500 and it still looked terrible. not sure if its a polarizer thing or a settings thing or honestly maybe just a me thing lol

does anyone have like a basic starting point for bright sunny days? even just a rough idea of where to set things would help a ton. also shooting RAW vs jpeg ? is it actually worth it for fixing stuff in post or is that overhyped

RAW is absolutely worth it, not even close. JPEGs from drones especially in harsh light are basically already baked and theres only so much you can pull back in lightroom before it falls apart. with RAW you have so much more room to recover highlights and bring up shadows independently which is exactly what you need when the sky is blowing out.

for bright midday sun my usual starting point is ISO 100, set the shutter to roughly double your framerate if youre doing video but for photos id go around 1/1000 or faster if its really harsh, and then adjust exposure compensation down maybe -0.7 to -1 stop depending on how intense it is. the mini 3 sensor is pretty decent but it still struggles with dynamic range in full sun so honestly the best tip i can give is just try to shoot in golden hour if you can swing it. the light is so much more forgiving and colors just pop in a completely different way. midday sun is the enemy for aerial stuff especially over anything light colored like sand or water

yeah same problem when i first started, took me forever to figure out it wasnt my settings it was just the time of day. nd filters helped me a lot too if you dont have one already ? i got a cheap set off amazon for my air 2s and even just having the nd16 on in bright sun made a noticeable difference in how the camera was actually metering. not a magic fix but worth trying