Editing DNG files with Affinity Photo from Mavic 3 Pro

[Mharz]

I'm breaking in my Mavic 3 Pro for some commercial work and I typically shoot RAW + JPG to give myself editing options. I've been using Affinity for some time and I'm very happy with it but I'm seeing horrible vignetting in the very corner of the images. I've been trying to find a way to recover the files without cropping but I've not been successful yet. See image below for an example. (Screen grab from Affinity(latest version) on Windows 10(most recent build) as of 12/4/21)



Notice the corners are blackened?

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[Hertzdonut]

To deal with the vignetting, doesn't Affinity Photo have some type of Content-Aware Fill you could use?

What's causing it in the first place, sorry, no guesses, I'm not super savvy with AP.

 

[adcimagery]

I'm guessing Affinity isn't applying any lens corrections. Many modern lens designs are setup to work in tandem with software corrections for things like vignetting and distortion, and the file without those corrections will look bad.

How do your JPGs look? I wonder if it's a lens problem, or Affinity is mishandling the DNG.

 

[Mharz]

Thanks for the responses.

Yes I can try to manually correct each image I import but I shoot a substantial number of images and that's just not a practical solution to the problem.

The JPGs are perfect around the edges so I agree with your assessment that it's probably Affinity not handling the DNG files properly OR DJI isn't pushing out files with corrections near the edges in the DNGs. I tend to think it's the former because I've not seen anyone else having this issue.

I just don't know a practical way to correct the issue other than selecting a lens that is "close" in the correction section during development. I think Affinity uses a common lens database and it just doesn't know the M3P lens yet so it's not processing the DNG correctly.

It works for now but I'm interested to hear other people's thoughts.

 

[Meta4]

The JPGs are perfect around the edges so I agree with your assessment that it's probably Affinity not handling the DNG files properly OR DJI isn't pushing out files with corrections near the edges in the DNGs. I tend to think it's the former because I've not seen anyone else having this issue.

It's no mystery and it's not exclusive to the Mavic 3.
People ask about this frequently.

DJI's DNG files have an inbuilt lens profile that Adobe and some other software will pick up and use.
If you use Affinity and many other software it does not and so lens corrections are not applied.
The correction is already done in jpg files when they are generated.
That's what you are seeing.

 

[Dave Maine]

Affinity has a vignette tool that is used to create vignettes deliberately. I believe that it can be pushed in the other direction to lighten the corners which should fix the vignetting. Lightroom’s corrector certainly does that.

Neither fix the distortion inherent in the inexpensive lenses that DJI supplies. You will need to fiddle with the distortion controls as well to fix this. The easiest solution however, is to shoot with slightly more image available, so that you have room to crop the distortion and vignetting out.

There is always some vignetting and distortion in wide angle lenses, even in lenses costing more than an entire drone.

 

[Arnold LeVine]

Is this dng the original photo? the whole image seems very soft to me.
Do you have some sort of filter on the lens? True vignetting like you are showing in the corners is traditionally caused by filters or lens hoods that block the edges of the light path, usually on wide angle lenses.
I can recreate this vignetting effect on my SLR by putting a lens hood designed for a normal lens on a wide angle lens, or too many screw on lens filters. (Old school photography being used to explain drone photos)

 

[gothi]

Thanks for the responses.

Yes I can try to manually correct each image I import but I shoot a substantial number of images and that's just not a practical solution to the problem.

The JPGs are perfect around the edges so I agree with your assessment that it's probably Affinity not handling the DNG files properly OR DJI isn't pushing out files with corrections near the edges in the DNGs. I tend to think it's the former because I've not seen anyone else having this issue.

I just don't know a practical way to correct the issue other than selecting a lens that is "close" in the correction section during development. I think Affinity uses a common lens database and it just doesn't know the M3P lens yet so it's not processing the DNG correctly.

It works for now but I'm interested to hear other people's thoughts.

It's Affinity, I ran into this a few months back too.

It's possible to create a Lensfun profile for your drone's camera, there's a couple of tutorials here. You can then update the Lensfun database Affinity uses.

Alternatively, if you have access to a Mac or iPad Affinity can use the Apple Core Image RAW engine. This reads the profile embedded in the profile and applies the distortion and vignetting corrections however, the downside to this is the hot pixel removal routine isn't run when this engine is used.

This issue of not using the inbuilt profile is sadly prevalent across most image editing software. Adobe are the only ones who support it fully and has decent noise/hot pixel removal - the few others that support it either disable hot pixel removal or do a bad job at it.

 

[TigersFan]

I just noticed that there is a camera profile now publicly available for the Mavic 3's Hasselblad camera L2D-20c from LensFun. You can get to it by following directions from the YouTube video at

Thanks to gothi for directing my attention to LensFun. The YouTube video procedure is still good for the latest profiles; others are not. I used the Hasselblad profiles to find the LD2-20c. (You have to use them and then this camera profile will be available in Affinity.)