Terrible photo quality / Watercolor?

[ionizer]

I got my Mavic back in October and have noticed that the image quality has been terrible since day one, but since I tended to fly at dusk I thought it was related to low light. I finally had a chance today to take some test shots under full sun and found the problem persists.

I took this image at noon with the sun mostly directly above. I attached it here directly off the SD card. It's pretty good overall, but the leaves are all blurred together into blobs.



This 100% crop of the same image shows the crappy looking leaves:



The photo below was taken today, too. The highlights on the leaves in the middle-distance seem to blown out.



When I take bracketed images, the resulting photos seem to exhibit this weird exposure problem, too:



How can I fix this problem? Before taking all these photos I reset the camera, performed a IMU calibration, and made sure the software was updated. I appreciate any advice or thoughts!

 

[dslater]

Take your pictures in raw format, jpg's have always and will always be crap from the mavic.

 

[AGT]

... and if you just need to use JPG, set sharpness + 1

 

[dslater]

Increasing sharpness doesn't really help jpeg quality to be honest.

 

[Cut.Aussie]

Set Sharpness to +1 to prevent the dji software using excessive compression

 

[ionizer]

Attached here are 4 JPEG images with various sharpness settings:

DJI_0203.JPG: Sharpness +0
DJI_0204.JPG: Sharpness +1
DJI_0205.JPG: Sharpness +2
DJI_0206.JPG: Sharpness +3

As dslater mentioned, they all appear to be similarly terrible.

The RAW image is definitely better, if a bit dark. See the difference here (this is a screenshot of a 100% crop of each picture lined up next to one another):

 

[dslater]

Raw files will always need editing in post (adobe lightroom for example) to look good. But once done the results are far far better than any jpeg's from the mavic.

 

[timesnaps]

Looks to me your ISO is rather high. Did you check that. In daylight you shouldnt need more than 100 ISO. Maybe forgot to turn it down, if doing manual adjustments (which is what you should be doing)

 

[ionizer]

Looks to me your ISO is rather high. Did you check that. In daylight you shouldnt need more than 100 ISO. Maybe forgot to turn it down, if doing manual adjustments (which is what you should be doing)

I'll have to check, but I'm pretty sure I was in auto mode for these images.