stills on the phantom 3 standard

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Hi. Newbie to forum here. I'm a serious amateur photographer producing a charity calendar [in Welsh!] I've bought a P3S. Stills from the RAW files of fairly nearby objects [eg my house]have good sharpness & colour after some Photoshopping [levels, high pass filter, noise reduction in ACR] However, landscapes towards infinity are unsharp & geens/yellows unnatural. In fact, a frame grab from video footage is clearer [which should be impossible!] I've set the drone camera to 100 ISO, set a fast enough shutter speed, fitted a Neewer CPL filter & made sure drone is hovering before firing the shutter. I know there are limitations with 12MP on a very small sensor, & noise reduction can degrade sharpness, but on the other hand the fact that the distance of lens to sensor plane is short, means the lens itself can be quite good because being small, it is cheaper to build than the lenses on my DSLR. Images posted from the P3S on this forum appear a lot crisper. Can anyone offer advice? Is the CPL degrading the quality? Is the lens, being fixed focal length & fixed focus, calibrated to be sharper at shorter distances? Can I tweak any settings to improve yellow & green colours of nature? [White balance default is very accurate for buildings]. I can't afford to trade up to other versions of the Phantom. Absolutely any suggestions welcome.
Thanks in anticipation & thanks for letting me join the forum
 
I hope you get a good answer. I am a amateur photographer and I was frustrated with the camera on the P3. It is more for video than stills. As long as you have good light, the stills weren't too bad. Try to only take pictures in good light. Low light and being a master at Photoshop might make it. I read on here on this forum, a stack of pictures made into one can produce good results. One person said, 15 pictures in groups of 5 made into 3, then to 1. Good luck.
 
Hi. Newbie to forum here. I'm a serious amateur photographer producing a charity calendar [in Welsh!] I've bought a P3S. Stills from the RAW files of fairly nearby objects [eg my house]have good sharpness & colour after some Photoshopping [levels, high pass filter, noise reduction in ACR] However, landscapes towards infinity are unsharp & geens/yellows unnatural. In fact, a frame grab from video footage is clearer [which should be impossible!] I've set the drone camera to 100 ISO, set a fast enough shutter speed, fitted a Neewer CPL filter & made sure drone is hovering before firing the shutter. I know there are limitations with 12MP on a very small sensor, & noise reduction can degrade sharpness, but on the other hand the fact that the distance of lens to sensor plane is short, means the lens itself can be quite good because being small, it is cheaper to build than the lenses on my DSLR. Images posted from the P3S on this forum appear a lot crisper. Can anyone offer advice? Is the CPL degrading the quality? Is the lens, being fixed focal length & fixed focus, calibrated to be sharper at shorter distances? Can I tweak any settings to improve yellow & green colours of nature? [White balance default is very accurate for buildings]. I can't afford to trade up to other versions of the Phantom. Absolutely any suggestions welcome.
Thanks in anticipation & thanks for letting me join the forum
I have found the stills to be the same way. I have grabbed them off the videos and dont have much better luck. The funny thing is when i go to the beach the pictures look better. Sorry don't have much to offer. I will watch your responses to see if anyone has any ideas.
 
I hope you get a good answer. I am a amateur photographer and I was frustrated with the camera on the P3. It is more for video than stills. As long as you have good light, the stills weren't too bad. Try to only take pictures in good light. Low light and being a master at Photoshop might make it. I read on here on this forum, a stack of pictures made into one can produce good results. One person said, 15 pictures in groups of 5 made into 3, then to 1. Good luck.
Thanks for replying.Do you mean using burst mode & then merging in Pshop? I'm wondering if PS would cope with alignment, but it's worth a try. It's my first drone & I'm still learning. It mystifies me that an image of a building from about 20 metres can be sharpened so that you can count the bricks, but trees at infinity are pretty poor. I've re-examined the landscape shots & in fact he mountain tops against the sky are sharp. I'm wondering if the issue is with dynamic range on yellows & greens. We'll see what people say on the forum!
 
I have found the stills to be the same way. I have grabbed them off the videos and dont have much better luck. The funny thing is when i go to the beach the pictures look better. Sorry don't have much to offer. I will watch your responses to see if anyone has any ideas.
Thanks. My sharpest shots were of a building from about 25 meres, taken late afternoon, full sun. It seems soft contours softly lit are a problem. I grabbed a video frame from that sequence & gave it the same processing as the still, & the results were "cleaner" [sharpness in digital terms has become a confusing concept] Why this should be, beats me!
 
I think I have gone some way to improving the stills. The enclosed JPG shows image from 2 bracketed DNGs blended in Photoshop. They were sharpened & de-noised in ACR then in PS [CS3] duplicated layer blended mode soft light - High pass sharpening on new layer & blended in overlay mode. The crop of the blue water butt was obtained by opening the image in PHOTOZOOM & interpolating to 25 inch print size at 300 dpi with full sharpening. However, though it could be called a landscape, I had to use my garden for the test, so the trees are still not at infinity. Comments welcome
TEST STILLS INCL BLOWUP.jpg
 
I've just read the beginning of this thread and without looking at my stills in detail I'd say that my P3 camera has produced remarkably good results without any post-processing but my top-of-the head comment is that 100 ISO is too slow a speed to set. Although the drone may look pretty still, it is constantly moving much more than a photographer holding a camera on shot. I use the 'auto' setting most of the time but I wouldn't go slower than 400 ISO.
 
Hi. Newbie to forum here. I'm a serious amateur photographer producing a charity calendar [in Welsh!] I've bought a P3S. Stills from the RAW files of fairly nearby objects [eg my house]have good sharpness & colour after some Photoshopping [levels, high pass filter, noise reduction in ACR] However, landscapes towards infinity are unsharp & geens/yellows unnatural. In fact, a frame grab from video footage is clearer [which should be impossible!] I've set the drone camera to 100 ISO, set a fast enough shutter speed, fitted a Neewer CPL filter & made sure drone is hovering before firing the shutter. I know there are limitations with 12MP on a very small sensor, & noise reduction can degrade sharpness, but on the other hand the fact that the distance of lens to sensor plane is short, means the lens itself can be quite good because being small, it is cheaper to build than the lenses on my DSLR. Images posted from the P3S on this forum appear a lot crisper. Can anyone offer advice? Is the CPL degrading the quality? Is the lens, being fixed focal length & fixed focus, calibrated to be sharper at shorter distances? Can I tweak any settings to improve yellow & green colours of nature? [White balance default is very accurate for buildings]. I can't afford to trade up to other versions of the Phantom. Absolutely any suggestions welcome.
Thanks in anticipation & thanks for letting me join the forum
You need a dslr not that crap they call a camera on the standard. Buy p45 it has a better camera
 
Although the drone may look pretty still, it is constantly moving much more than a photographer holding a camera on shot. I use the 'auto' setting most of the time but I wouldn't go slower than 400 ISO.
The drone doesn't hold the camera.
The gimbal does that, and a lot better than I can hand-hold my SLR.
This panorama was made up of stills shot at 1/2 sec ISO 100 f5.6
DJI_0364-400b-X3.jpg
 
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I've just read the beginning of this thread and without looking at my stills in detail I'd say that my P3 camera has produced remarkably good results without any post-processing but my top-of-the head comment is that 100 ISO is too slow a speed to set. Although the drone may look pretty still, it is constantly moving much more than a photographer holding a camera on shot. I use the 'auto' setting most of the time but I wouldn't go slower than 400 ISO.
Thanks for the thought. I'll try it. As a photographer mainly of portraits & landscapes, I've always gone for a low ISO, but of course on my cameras I have image stabilisation.. Because of the number of pixels on a small sensor, do you find noise a problem? I am applying luminence noise reduction, as I find there is no problem with colour noise.
 
Thanks for the thought. I'll try it. As a photographer mainly of portraits & landscapes, I've always gone for a low ISO, but of course on my cameras I have image stabilisation.
Your drone camera has gimbal stabilisation.
Stick to ISO 100 unless there is no other option like shooting a moving subject in very low light conditions.
If the subject isn't moving there's no need to go higher than ISO 100.
 

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