okay this has been driving me insane for like three weeks. doing a straightforward ag field survey, flat terrain, nothing complicated, and every single time i process the ortho in DroneDeploy the western edge of the map comes out noticeably blurry compared to the rest. we're talking clearly soft, like the stitching just gave up over there.

the weird part is the raw images from that area look fine when i pull them off the card. sharp, properly exposed, nothing obviously wrong. overlap should be good because i planned the mission the same way across the whole field. flying a P4P v2 which i know is getting old but its always been reliable for this kind of work.

ive reprocessed it twice, tried bumping the quality settings up, same result every time. is this a GSD thing, a lighting thing, what am i missing

check what time of day you were flying. if the sun was low and coming from that direction when you hit the western portions of the mission you can get specular reflection or just inconsistent lighting across the mosaic which confuses the feature matching. photogrammetry really hates lighting that changes mid-flight, the algorithm needs consistent texture to match points between images and if half your images over that area have different shadows or glare the stitching falls apart even if the individual images look okay to your eye.

also worth checking if your mission started on one end and ended on the other, sometimes the aircraft speed or camera timing drifts slightly toward the end of a long mission and you can end up with effectively less overlap than planned even if the mission planner said 75%. might be worth pulling the EXIF data and checking actual image spacing vs what you expected

had almost the exact same issue last summer, turned out my ND filter had a tiny smudge on one edge that i completely missed on preflight. like a fingerprint right on the edge of the glass. looked fine in normal light but it was killing sharpness in one corner of every frame. worth checking even if you think the lens is clean, i wipe mine down now before every single mission