Mavic Air 2 Camera

[AlanLichty]

As some of you are aware I got a Mavic Air 2 around Xmas time and have been exploring what all it can do for me with still photography. It has a lot of video capabilities that I am sure I will have fun playing with but for me the drone was all about a flying tripod for still photos that still was within reach of my piggy bank. I have had nothing but rotten weather for flying since the day I bought it with only a handful of flights so far in between rain and snow showers so my flight time is pretty pathetic so far. I have taken a few airborne images and far more with the drone sitting on my desk so I could learn the camera system.

The documentation and web info on the camera is almost entirely focused on video with just enough info on the camera for still photography use to be somewhat misleading. I have tried out enough different settings to be able to clarify some of what it can do for anyone who is considering this model of DJI drone.

In the raw specifications the camera is either 12MP (4000x3000) or 48MP (8000x6000).

Here are the photo modes from the DJI web site: (I highlighted the modes that are 12MP only)

• Single: 12 MP and 48 MP
  Burst: 12 MP, 3/5/7 frames
  Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB): 12MP, 3/5 Frames at 0.7EV Bias
  Timed: 12 MP 2/3/5/7/10/15/20/30/60 seconds
  SmartPhoto: Scene Recognition, HyperLight, and HDR
  HDR Panorama[1]:
  Vertical (3×1): 3328×8000 pixels (Width×Height)
  Wide-angle (3×3): 8000×6144 pixels (Width×Height)
  180° Panorama (3×7): 8192×3500 pixels (Width×Height)
  Sphere (3×8+1): 8192×4096 pixels (Width×Height)

Using the builtin panorama modes hasn't impressed me much yet. I still have some more experiments to run for panoramas but the fixed pixel sizes shown above are not changeable items so there is no option to have a 3x1 wide panorama using the 48MP sensor setting.

Both the 12MP and the 48MP images are somewhat noisy images compared to what I get from both my DSLR and my iPhone 13 Pro but I will say the the 48MP images clean up quite well using Topaz DeNoise AI and Topaz Sharpen AI. I tried using burst mode with 5 images for median blending with 12MP images to see how much cleaner an image could be. The result was certainly an improvement over a standalone 12MP image but not even vaguely close to the resolution of the same scene using a 48MP image.

I posted a panorama taken from directly over my house last week when I got a break in the storms. This is a 2 shot panorama using 48MP mode where I rotated the drone to reposition for the second image. The full image size is 11,747 x 4183 after cropping. The panorama was stitched in Photoshop and run through Topaz Denoise AI and Sharpen AI before being resized quite a bit for web posting. Click through for a larger view.

This is a 100% crop from the full sized original with no further edits on a small target in the center of the scene where the Willamette River flows into the Columbia with some of Portland's port facilities visible on the left. I extracted this to show what can be done with the 48MP mode images. Click through for a closer view.

Overall I am quite pleased with what the camera can do with a still image although a bit disappointed that most of the other interesting camera features are limited to the 12MP resolution. Like just about everything you get what you pay for and this was a $$ drone instead of the $$$ or $$$$ versions.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Looking good Alan, My hand eye coordination is not up to this sort of device so I am setting it out, but you can get some unique images.

 

[Jeffrey]

Nice writeup Alan. Good for you. You will have plenty of fun. It's a 12 MP sensor, so I don't know why DJI mentions anything about 48 MP unless they also add 'uprezing', which will certainly deteriorate image quality. Like many of us here, we want to get as close to our DSLR's as possible. Sometimes impossible! I do a lot of stitching to gain file size, but the DR and general IQ are sometimes difficult. Our ground based cameras spoil us. Beware of noise, as you must have already found out. You will learn which settings in drone end in camera raw help minimize that.

 

[AlanLichty]

Nice writeup Alan. Good for you. You will have plenty of fun. It's a 12 MP sensor, so I don't know why DJI mentions anything about 48 MP unless they also add 'uprezing', which will certainly deteriorate image quality. Like many of us here, we want to get as close to our DSLR's as possible. Sometimes impossible! I do a lot of stitching to gain file size, but the DR and general IQ are sometimes difficult. Our ground based cameras spoil us. Beware of noise, as you must have already found out. You will learn which settings in drone end in camera raw help minimize that.

Thanks Jeffrey - your tripod in the air imagery is part of what motivated me to dive into this pond

The 12MP sensor uses a Quad Bayer filter that DJI is repurposing to single sensor Bayer filtering for the 48MP. I have sampled images from both modes on targets like bookshelves (drone stationary on a desk surface) and the difference in resolution SOOC for reading titles on the book spines isn't even close. Both MP modes have quite a bit of noise SOOC compared to my other camera gear. Topaz Denoise/Sharpen appear to be able to clean up a lot of the crud at the pixel level and at least for my tastes become a necessary processing step.

I am using DNG output but I haven't gathered enough experience with real world subjects yet to start building up profiles for importing the images. I am still a babe in the woods with this new toy and can't wait for some workable flying weather to go out and play.

 

[Jim Dockery]

Have fun Alan! I'd like to have that drone to carry hiking for just video which seems to be on a par with my Mavic 2P.

For stills I shoot manual, RAW bursts of 5 so that I can process in ACR, median blend for noise reduction, then bring back into ACR for pano stitching. That sunset pano is quite nice, look forward to more.

 

[AlanLichty]

Have fun Alan! I'd like to have that drone to carry hiking for just video which seems to be on a par with my Mavic 2P.

For stills I shoot manual, RAW bursts of 5 so that I can process in ACR, median blend for noise reduction, then bring back into ACR for pano stitching. That sunset pano is quite nice, look forward to more.

Thanks Jim - I readily confess that the notion of going straight up to shoot a sunset from my driveway was shamelessly copied from your shots of Lake Stevens. I wasn't sure I would be able to get reflections off of Vancouver Lake until I got the drone up high enough to see it in the camera view. The lake itself is directly under the west approach to the runways at PDX and is tightly controlled airspace.

From what I have seen so far I think the video features are probably more advanced than the still capabilities for the Air 2. I recalled your median blending technique and tried it out to see how well it would work with the Air 2 but the burst mode is exclusive to 12MP resolution and can't be used with the 48MP mode. I did go ahead and shoot a 5 shot burst with the drone on a desktop followed by a 48MP single shot and while the image from a 5 shot burst benefitted a lot from median blending the resulting 12MP image wasn't really in the same league with the 48MP image at all. Unfortunate from my perspective - the RAW 48MP Air 2 output would benefit from the median blending technique as well. It's possible DJI could update this (mis)feature in a future software upgrade but I am not going to hold my breath.

 

[JimFox]

Where is the median blend happening? Part DJI app? Or in Photoshop.

 

[AlanLichty]

Where is the median blend happening? Part DJI app? Or in Photoshop.

Photoshop. We are extracting DNG files from the drone.

 

[Jim Dockery]

Alan, you could always just snap 2 or 3 quick shots for median blending, should work fine for many distant landscapes, not so well with moving subjects like water (which are difficult for the burst/blend also).

 

[AlanLichty]

I will try that - most of my panoramas will likely be stationary subjects. Moving water doesn't make nice panoramas unless you are doing long exposures and that's almost always going to be a DSLR on a tripod task.

 

[Alisa]

Beautiful! Love the light in both of these.

 

[JimFox]

Photoshop. We are extracting DNG files from the drone.

Gotcha. I could Median blend then too, My burst is a bracket of 3.... but right now, my focus on video it seems, and my photos are something I have to force myself to take with mine or I will forget.

 

[TimMc]

Alan I have the Magic Air which probably shares the same camera. The built in pano can give good results in calm conditions and when the operator stays still. But pulling the shadows really brings a noise storm

With good conditions the over lapping images seem to generate much better detail than a single image, but it is inconsistent . Enjoy your drone.

 

[AlanLichty]

Tim - the camera in the Mavic Air 2 is different than the one in the Mavic Air and uses a Quad Bayer sensor configuration for 12MP imaging with the ability to switch to a single pixel Bayer sensor configuration for 48MP imaging. So far I am more impressed with the output of the 48MP mode than the 12MP mode so I will stick with manual positioning and exposures for panoramas. Both modes are still quite sloppy and need a lot of processing compared to either my Canon 5D MkIV or my iPhone 13 Pro but those cameras can't fly

I strongly suspect that the 20MP camera in the Air 2S blows the Air 2 48MP image out of the water for IQ. High pixel counts make nice marketing details without necessarily improving the output.

 

[AlanLichty]

A couple of observations after using the Air 2 for a month now and several hundred images later.

First off is the biggest Achilles heel for this camera - dynamic range and subjects with a lot of darkness. Low light such as a sunrise and/or sunset conditions take noise issues to an extreme and shadow areas with either the 48MP mode or the 12MP Quad Bayer configuration pretty much eliminate any thoughts about making prints from this drone. While I can make a sunrise shot look vaguely workable for a web post it requires some careful tweaking in Topaz Denoise AI to get there. This shot is from a sunrise in Brookings last month and it's worth noting that it took multiple tries to get this much out of it. You don't want to see what happens if you try to do any shadow recovery with this capture so it's best to leave this on the dark side. This was a 48MP capture.

If your goal is to take images like this for prints of any size you should be shopping for a more serious drone than the Air 2.

I have now compared the 12MP Quad Bayer camera configuration a lot more against the 48MP mode. I didn't find that the Quad Bayer sensor configuration really made all that much difference for my purposes - Topaz Denoise AI does a much better job of cleaning up the sensor noise than the 12MP Quad Bayer feature. If you are comparing simple JPG output from both modes with an eye towards your next Instagram post sans any edits you might like the 12MP results. I did try using the 12MP mode for shots like the one above but didn't see any appreciable difference in how bad the noise levels were for shadowed areas in low light. At the end of the day this is still a phone camera sensor that DJI stuffed into the Air 2 and it certainly isn't using computational photography technology like what I see with my iPhone 13 Pro or my old iPhone 11 Pro. While those cameras can function in the rain and underwater for short periods of time they can't fly.......

I don't regret buying the Air 2 as a first drone but I will confess that I wish I had sprung for a better flying camera and am already scratching my head over how I can afford a Mavic 3.