okay so this has been bugging me for a while and im hoping someone here has seen this before. im getting these kind of smeared blurry patches in my orthos, not everywhere, just in certain spots. the weird thing is theyre not always in the same place ? like i flew the same field twice and the artifacts moved. so its probably not a sensor issue on my camera.

flying a phantom 4 RTK, processing in pix4d, using ground control points. overlap is 80/75 which should be more than enough. the blurry patches kind of look like the software couldnt stitch that section properly but i cant figure out why. the quality report shows green across the board which is annoying because clearly something is wrong.

conditions were pretty calm, not a ton of wind, midday sun which i know isnt ideal but ive flown the same conditions before without this happening. any ideas?

midday sun can actually cause this more than people realize especially if you have any reflective surfaces in the area ? water, greenhouses, even wet soil can cause exposure inconsistencies between images that mess up the stitching. the quality report in pix4d is kind of optimistic, it'll show green even when things arent great. check your initial processing report and look at the median reprojection error, if its above like 0.3-0.4 pixels somethings off. also are you using the RTK corrections live or post-processing? ive seen issues when the RTK fix drops mid-flight and you get mixed fix quality in the image metadata

had something similar and it turned out to be motion blur, shutter speed was too low for the altitude and speed i was flying at. phantom 4 rtk has a mechanical shutter so its less prone to rolling shutter issues but you can still get blur if your exposure settings arent dialed. what shutter speed were you running? midday should give you plenty of light to push it up pretty high