so ive been flying my mini 3 pro for about 4 months now and honestly the flying part i feel pretty comfortable with but my photos just look... flat? washed out? like when i look at them on my phone right after landing they seem ok but when i get home and open them on my laptop they look really pale and boring compared to what i actually saw up there

im shooting in auto most of the time which i know is probably the issue but every time i try to switch to manual i get confused about what to actually set. like do i need to worry about shutter speed for stills or is that more of a video thing. and my white balance is also on auto. should i be locking that in before i take off

also someone told me i should shoot in d-log or something like that but then my photos looked even worse so i went back to normal. any help appreciated, been lurking here for a while and you guys seem to know your stuff

the d-log thing trips everyone up at first ? d-log is really meant for video where you're going to grade the footage later, for photos you want to either shoot jpeg with a normal color profile or better yet shoot raw if your bird supports it. raw gives you way more to work with in lightroom or whatever you use without looking washed out straight out of camera

for white balance yeah lock it before you take off, auto WB can shift between shots especially when you're panning across different parts of the sky and it makes editing a nightmare if you're doing a set of photos and they're all slightly different color temperatures. i usually set mine to around 5500k on a sunny day and just leave it

shutter speed for stills matters more than people think too. if you're getting any motion blur from the drone drifting even slightly, that kills sharpness. i keep mine at least 1/500 on a bright day, bump ISO a little if you have to

oh man i went through the exact same thing when i started, the photos looked so much better in my head lol. what helped me most was just shooting raw and then watching a couple youtube videos on editing drone photos specifically because editing landscape drone shots is a little different than regular photography. the horizon is almost always in frame and the sky exposure is fighting with the ground exposure constantly

one thing nobody told me for ages ? graduated filters in lightroom are your best friend for drone shots, pull the sky down a bit and lift the foreground and suddenly everything looks way more like what you actually saw