Mid Day Loowit +1 new image

[AlanLichty]

Loowit is the Native American name for Mt. St. Helens which never made much of an impact on British map makers who wanted things named after Real People(TM) from Britain of course.

I wandered up to Salmon Creek yesterday after getting my drone all set up and registered with the FAA and took a lot of trial images trying out each of the cameras and ways to shoot with them. This is the view of Mt. St. Helens using the 70mm lens from just over Salmon Creek. I set the system up to save both the processed jpeg as well as the RAW capture so I could compare DJI's suggested processing with my own which allowed me to tweak camera profile presets for handling the RAW files on import. This was processed using my new profile preset for the 70mm lens/sensor.

C&C always welcome.

Edit: here is the same shooting point with the 166mm lens:

 

[Ben Egbert]

Nice clear image. I start with auto and tweak from there. It’s surprising how little tweaking is reqd from
that point

 

[AlanLichty]

Nice clear image. I start with auto and tweak from there. It’s surprising how little tweaking is reqd from
that point

Thanks Ben - most of the auto settings on the drone apply to the jpegs and not the RAW files so in order for me to see what DJI intended as the processing for each of the three sensors I kept the jpegs as a comparative point for fine tuning my own "auto" settings with my own tweaks on DJI's processing model. There is quite a gap between the jpeg auto output and the appearance of the RAW capture.

 

[Nilo Photography]

Loowit is the Native American name for Mt. St. Helens which never made much of an impact on British map makers who wanted things named after Real People(TM) from Britain of course.

I wandered up to Salmon Creek yesterday after getting my drone all set up and registered with the FAA and took a lot of trial images trying out each of the cameras and ways to shoot with them. This is the view of Mt. St. Helens using the 70mm lens from just over Salmon Creek. I set the system up to save both the processed jpeg as well as the RAW capture so I could compare DJI's suggested processing with my own which allowed me to tweak camera profile presets for handling the RAW files on import. This was processed using my new profile preset for the 70mm lens/sensor.

View attachment 60569

C&C always welcome.

Nice shot. I'm jealous since my drone is no longer. Have to get a new one.

 

[AlanLichty]

Nice shot. I'm jealous since my drone is no longer. Have to get a new one.

Thanks! Drones just keep getting better in all price ranges so a new one is all but guaranteed to be better than your last one.

 

[JimFox]

Very cool Alan. That's a nice view. I have mixed feelings on the mountains name. Sometimes they sound better with our names, but sometimes not. For example I prefer Mt Denali now over Mt Mckinely in Alaska. I guess it's what we are used to will sound best to each of us.

As for the jpgs. I always shoot both. Sometimes I will like the way the jpg was rendered by DJI, and then other times I prefer to edit the raw. I figured the file sizes are so small anyway for jpgs, it's just easier to keep Raw + jpg as my default.

 

[AlanLichty]

Very cool Alan. That's a nice view. I have mixed feelings on the mountains name. Sometimes they sound better with our names, but sometimes not. For example I prefer Mt Denali now over Mt Mckinely in Alaska. I guess it's what we are used to will sound best to each of us.

As for the jpgs. I always shoot both. Sometimes I will like the way the jpg was rendered by DJI, and then other times I prefer to edit the raw. I figured the file sizes are so small anyway for jpgs, it's just easier to keep Raw + jpg as my default.

Thanks Jim - my primary reason for shooting both formats was so I could fine tune import presets in Lightroom that would get me close to DJI's JPG render but that's just a starting point for for my edits. The lens/sensors are not identical by any means but in all cases fall short of how I want to edit and present my imagery. The file sizes are not insignificant when you are dealing with the 70mm lens at 48MP. Once I get my own lens profiles set up I will kill off the jpeg outputs since I have no use for them beyond being a reference point.

 

[Beth]

dji's raw files leave a lot to be desired. hopefully they focus on that for a bit now that their photography hardware is getting better. love your recent comparisons between the wide angle and telephoto cameras.

 

[AlanLichty]

dji's raw files leave a lot to be desired. hopefully they focus on that for a bit now that their photography hardware is getting better. love your recent comparisons between the wide angle and telephoto cameras.

Actually RAW is just that - raw and it isn't supposed to be heavily processed. That's true for almost all of our DSLRs where most of the in camera features are applied to JPEGs. DJI uses their software tuning to to do color corrections and contrast on the jpegs and leaves the RAW output for those of us who are happier rolling our own so to speak.

The RAW files in this case are in better shape for sharpness and color noise compared to the Mavic 3 but are still raw sensor data. In this case I used DJI's jpeg images as a starting point for setting up color profiles in the camera calibration section of Lightroom to preprocess the DNG import before I take over with my own edits and I do tweak them quite a bit for my own tastes.

 

[Beth]

what i meant is that the colors are a little off on their raw files. a 20mp raw file from dji doesn't have the same tonal range or color as a raw file from fuji, sony, canon cameras i've used. i always have to push the raw file more to get it to look the same way. and then it gets pushed too much and falls apart.

 

[Alisa]

Very nice view. I like the crop on the 2nd one.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Very nice Alan - I like these, especially that second view with the tele lens. I think your approach at dialing in your starting point settings for processing the RAWs makes sense. Wonder how it will behave under non-bluebird sky conditions, you might have to run this sort of test a couple times. Thanks for sharing these and your approach.

ML

 

[AlanLichty]

what i meant is that the colors are a little off on their raw files. a 20mp raw file from dji doesn't have the same tonal range or color as a raw file from fuji, sony, canon cameras i've used. i always have to push the raw file more to get it to look the same way. and then it gets pushed too much and falls apart.

I have had exactly the same experience with the tele lens on the Mavic 3 which is why I am making sure I align the color calibration up with DJI's processed result with the jpegs. Note that my presets are exclusively the camera color calibration sliders and not the white balance sliders.

Very nice view. I like the crop on the 2nd one.

Thanks Alisa - the only crop on the second one is to trim it to a 2x3. It was shot with a different lens/sensor at 166mm where the first one was 70mm.

Very nice Alan - I like these, especially that second view with the tele lens. I think your approach at dialing in your starting point settings for processing the RAWs makes sense. Wonder how it will behave under non-bluebird sky conditions, you might have to run this sort of test a couple times. Thanks for sharing these and your approach.

ML

Thanks Mike - I will do lots of iterations with this before I am done since I can fine tune these presets forever if I want

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Nice views both. I don’t much care much for the Dji Jpegs however.

 

[AlanLichty]

Nice views both. I don’t much care much for the Dji Jpegs however.

I don't either but they did up their game quite a bit with this new bird and it makes a nice starting point for the basic color calibration. Neither of these would be mistaken for a DJI jpeg if you saw both side by side.