Mavic image quality question

[pomm001]

I am a newbie just getting to know my Mavic
So far i'm loving it, one thing that does give me concerns is the colour quality of the raw video and stills.
Quite strangely here in the UK it has been hot and sunny for a few weeks the ground cover is pretty dry and light in colour and when i fly, mostly early evening, my issue is that once say 100 ft looking to the horizon the sky has no colour and is almost white.
I have watched endless utube on filters etc, the settings are all standard in auto essentially on 100 iso
what do i need to get some depth of colour into the sky, thinking back to my camera days a polarising filter helped ?
Many thanks

 

[melmartin]

Many photos out of any camera are dull without some post processing. I suggest if there is a lot of bright sky you use the bracketing function (AEB). Always shoot RAW, and don't expect your Mavic to take great shots using JPEGS and on board processing. As any photographer will tell you, taking the picture is only half of what's needed for a good image. There are a lot of videos around that explain bracketing and post processing of drone images.

 

[melmartin]

Here's a recent photo from my Arizona USA neighborhood... Mavic Pro panorama post processed in On1. Photoshop, Lightroom, Luminar would all do well with this data. In this photo I didn't use bracketing, but adjusted highlights to reduce the sky brightness and brought out the shadow detail as it was close to sunset. The Mavics are very capable cameras for still and film...

 

[pomm001]

Many photos out of any camera are dull without some post processing. I suggest if there is a lot of bright sky you use the bracketing function (AEB). Always shoot RAW, and don't expect your Mavic to take great shots using JPEGS and on board processing. As any photographer will tell you, taking the picture is only half of what's needed for a good image. There are a lot of videos around that explain bracketing and post processing of drone images.

Thanks for the tip
the jpeg was just a screen grab of video

 

[gnirtS]

The camera on the mavic is fairly poor (think 2015 cellphone level) and has terrible dynamic range. That means the range of bright to dark it can see is very limited so if there is a big difference in brightness in scenes its going to struggle to render that. The result commonly is burnt out white sky.
Now EVERY camera on earth has a specific dynamic range and the "white sky" problem isnt limited to the mavic by any means but its a lot worse than proper cameras.
No filter can change dynamic range so dont bother trying to "fix" it that way. The Mavic Pros bit rate of only 60mbps for 4k makes this worse as compression dumps even more detail and DR from a video.

Quite simply, for video you only really have one choice, set the EV bias to under expose the scene to pull some detail from the sky and lighting the shadows in post (this will bring noise up too). OR simple face a different direction where the sun is less dominant in the scene. Hazy skies are generally a photography nightmare for the reasons you just found. Always use the histogram in the app and ideally over exposure zebras to judge this.

Now if you're doing stills you DO have more options and can usually get a good result. Firstly ALWAYS shoot raw and make sure you don't have ND filters on. Then you can take a series of exposures ranging from say -2 to +2 and combine these afterwards in post into a HDR image to create more dynamic range.
The drone does have an inbuilt HDR and inbuilt bracket modes but these generally don't work too well for large differences in brightness as it uses exposure values too close together.

Photography is all about light and in particular being aware of where the sun is and not shooting into it in general.