image quality poor

[mini2flyer]

my mavic 2 pro photos are blurry and i have tried changing a few settings and nothing makes it better. any ideas? i dont know a lot about cameras but feel like they should be clearer

 

[Meta4]

mavic 2 pro photos are blurry and i have tried changing a few settings and nothing makes it better. any ideas? i dont know a lot about cameras but feel like they should be clearer

The first thing I notice about that pic is that there's no subject to look at, it's 100% distant background.

It would be a big help to see some examples at full size to be able to tell what the issue may be.
Can you upload a couple of original jpg image files to Google Drive or similar and post a link here?

 

[mini2flyer]

i cant seem to get it on google drive from my smart controller.

 

[Meta4]

i cant seem to get it on google drive from my smart controller.

OK ... that image has what I was looking for to see what's happening.
The image metadata shows that the camera exposure settings were:
5.0 sec f11 ISO 100 and that explains the poor quality.

There's some movement which has caused the image to be unsharp with the shutter open for 5 seconds (a very long time in photography).

If you aren't familiar with camera exposure settings, here are some suggestions that should see you getting good exposure in future.
I'd recommend :
Setting the camera to use aperture priority
Set the aperture value of f5.6
This should be fine for most daylight shots (you can open the aperture towards f2.8 if you are shooting in low light).
Set the ISO to 100

Your camera settings should look like this:

Now your camera will select an appropriate shutter speed for the brightness of each scene and you should be getting much better results consistently.
Try that and report back if it's a big improvement or if you want more help.

 

[Meta4]

One more thing ... 5 seconds at f 11 doesn't seem to be right if that was a daylight scene.
I wonder if you had an ND filter on the lens that cut the light level significantly?

If you are shooting stills (unless you have a specific reason to use an ND filter), they aren't going to help you and should be left off.

 

[mini2flyer]

One more thing ... 5 seconds at f 11 doesn't seem to be right if that was a daylight scene.
I wonder if you had an ND filter on the lens that cut the light level significantly?

If you are shooting stills (unless you have a specific reason to use an ND filter), they aren't going to help you and should be left off.

Thankyou. I will give that a try sometime tomorrow and see if it does what i want. Also i had no ND filter on but it was a hazy overcast day as it rained most of the day so that might be partly why it wasn't brighter in the last picture.

 

[Meta4]

Also i had no ND filter on but it was a hazy overcast day as it rained most of the day so that might be partly why it wasn't brighter in the last picture.

Thanks .. that's not why the pic wasn't brighter, but it explains why the camera used such a long exposure time to get proper light levels.
.. that and the aperture being stopped down to f11.
But if you try the settings they should give very good exposure for ~95% of your shots.

I'm a pro photographer and those are the settings I use to get shots like you see in this thread ....

M

Post in thread '2025 - my year in focus'

Jan 20, 2026

Meta4, superb pics!

I can't recall if you had an M2P in the past, but would you venture an opinion of the M2P vs M4P picture quality?

Thanks.
I didn't have the Mavic 2 because it had the same camera as the Phantom 4 pro that I used until the Mavic 3 came along.
That camera with the 1" sensor was very good, but the bigger sensor in the Mavic 4 pro is even better.
And with the other two cameras added to the advances in flight ability, the 4 is as good as you can get (for now).

• Meta4

• 

The only exception is that I open the aperture up towards f2.8 when I'm shooting at night or in very low light.

 

[Vic Moss]

View attachment 187609
i cant seem to get it on google drive from my smart controller.

If these images are from your controller, that means they are only thumbnails. You need to use the images off of the SD card in your drone. You'll never get a clear photo from the pics on your controller.

 

[mini2flyer]

If these images are from your controller, that means they are only thumbnails. You need to use the images off of the SD card in your drone. You'll never get a clear photo from the pics on your controller.

I got the last one from the SD card. To get pictures off my controller i upload to Skypixel and it has seemed to work before.

 

[Vic Moss]

I got the last one from the SD card. To get pictures off my controller i upload to Skypixel and it has seemed to work before.

Ah. Check to make sure you're focused as well then. Are you using autofocus or manual focus? But it's also likely the shutter speed.

 

[Meta4]

Ah. Check to make sure you're focused as well then. Are you using autofocus or manual focus? But it's also likely the shutter speed.

See post #4 ... it's all sorted out.

 

[hank970]

I get consistently better results, every time, by selecting a focus spot on the touch screen rather than relying on the device to set focus by itself. Try that, if you haven't already.

 

[Droning on and on...]

See post #4 ... it's all sorted out.

Yeah, 5s exposure pretty much says, "blurry".

 

[Meta4]

I get consistently better results, every time, by selecting a focus spot on the touch screen rather than relying on the device to set focus by itself. Try that, if you haven't already.

Focusing was not an issue ... a 5 second exposure was.
But there's really no need to select a focus spot, unless you have a subject very close to the drone and a larger distant background (something which is rarely done in drone photography).

DJI drones autofocus very well, it's hard to imagine how you could improve on it.
In >10 years of using autofocus in my drone work, I've never noticed anything unsatisfactory about the focus.

 

[mini2flyer]

The first one is f5.6 and the second is f2.8. It seems like they still could be better. I remember some of the pictures i took six months ago being a lot clearer so I know it could do better.

 

[mini2flyer]

Picture from last September that was much clearer.

 

[Meta4]

View attachment 187620
View attachment 187621
The first one is f5.6 and the second is f2.8. It seems like they still could be better. I remember some of the pictures i took six months ago being a lot clearer so I know it could do better.

I remember some of the pictures i took six months ago being a lot clearer so I know it could do better.

Your pictures will always look a lot better if there is a subject rather than just background that's so far away that there's no way to tell anything about the image quality.
In photography, rule 1 is ... Have a subject.
And that goes double for low light photography.

 

[mini2flyer]

Your pictures will always look a lot better if there is a subject rather than just background that's so far away that there's no way to tell anything about the image quality.
In photography, rule 1 is ... Have a subject.
And that goes double for low light photography.

So why is the picture from September so much clearer? Its not like there is more of a subject that i was focusing on

 

[Meta4]

So why is the picture from September so much clearer? Its not like there is more of a subject that i was focusing on

As I said in my last post, there is a subject you can look at and evaluate.
Your most recent two pics have no subject, nothing at all to look at and tell if is well exposed, well focused etc.
In short they are pictures of nothing, while the older photo is a picture of something.

Apart from that ...
The foregrounds in your recent pix are dark because your composition is half bright sky and half dark land.
The camera can't properly expose for bright and dark in the same exposure and you end up with an exposure that's an average of bright+dark and neither is properly exposed.

 

[Johnmcl7]

So why is the picture from September so much clearer? Its not like there is more of a subject that i was focusing on

I agree with Meta4's comments above. Your photos in post #15 and #16 are quite different because they're taken at different times of the day. The image in #16 is taken in good light so the scene itself is well lit whereas your other images are in much lower light and it's more difficult to capture the comparatively bright sky and dark ground so you get that murky look in the ground areas. Your bright scene has almost no sky so there's no issue balancing the exposure and it also has the buildings at the front whereas the dark images don't have anything at the front so you're drawn to that murky ground area.

Also your shutter speed in the #15 images is still very low, one second for one image and 1/2.5 seconds for the other whereas your shutter speed in the #16 image is 1/240. With the mechanical gimbal you can get away with slower shutter speeds than you would with a handheld camera but it's still risking motion in the image as well as some movement in the drone.

I think if you took a comparable photo now to #16 you'd get similar results. Also something to bear in mind is that the Mavic 2 Pro has a 1in sensor which is a good bit smaller than a FF sensor so the depth of field is much greater anyway plus you have a long distance to your subject so you don't need to worry about stopping right down to increase depth of field. Just in case that's why you were using F11.