Drone Edit Magic: Expert Techniques to Boost Your Aerial Photography from Amateur to Pro

Hello again drone lovers! Long time no see, but that doesn’t matter: today we are coming back again and reloaded to share with you guys all my experiences that have helped me deliver great aerial images under almost any condition.

First of all, we just have to know the exact reason why your client needs those images and what he is going to do with them. All this info is necessary so you could plan ahead about the making of them. Is your client in need of pictures for social media? Or maybe printing? are going to be used on a website so they need to load fast or are they going to be downloaded in high resolution?

The most important part of this pre-production stage is to listen to your customer. If the customer is your own personal brand, then you need to be clear about the use of the images. Why? Because you are about to lose time and energy if you get a really big, heavy image to a website that focuses more on SEO and loading image speed than on having a huge resolution, heavy image.

So, if your work is for being the graphic part of an article, you have to export it in a small resolution, like, for example, maximum 2000 pixels on its longest edge, but on the other side if you plan to showcase the work on high resolution screens like 4K TVs, you should export in the highest resolution possible, not caring about the file size.

Let’s say that you already know what your customer wants for his images: he’s going to print some in flyers and some are going to be used for his website. First of all, editing images is something that can be relative, but when we talk about commercial use, you want to be clear, sharp and colorful (this last word can change regarding the brand and its style).

When you are making the images with your drone, try to shoot in raw and try to underexpose. Some users maybe won’t have the possibility to shoot raw (like DJI Mavic Mini or the DJI Neo) but that doesn’t matter at this moment, because you can actually underexpose your image. When you underexpose the image, you have higher chances of recovering in post and avoiding some highlights that could make your image less suited for this specific example of commercial usage.

Once we have the images in our hard drive, and we have the info on the uses of the images, we select what are we going to do to put them ready for use. I myself edit on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, since a long time ago and will recommend downloading at least a free trial. Other software I have used through my audiovisual journey are Capture One, Adobe Photoshop and Snapseed when I’m doing edits on my phone. For culling of the images I use Photo Mechanic, and I love every bit of it.

Maybe you will ask why I should use a different program for viewing and selecting my images and a different one for editing. And the answer for that is: speed.

Only when you start selecting and discarding A LOT (hundreds, sometimes, thousands of images) of files, you start noticing some lags on the process. And it’s totally understandable because those are programs for editing. Yeah, you can select images on them, but their strong point is to edit the images. So in this case I will recommend you to install a copy of Photo Mechanic. There’s versions for Mac and PC.

The photo mechanic interface is simple, fast and easy to use. There’s a folder tree at the left side and you decide in which folder you are going to work.

Open the folder and just double click in the image and then this comes out.

In this next screen you a left column where it shows you the thumbnails of the pictures on the folder (I just hide it because it distracts me), a real (and fast) preview of the image you have selected and on the right column, detailed and useful info of the image, even a small histogram down there. But I’m telling you my friend.

This program is fast, fast as the roadrunner, fast as an FPV drone, fast as Lightroom will be if you are using a really expensive computer. And that’s why I use it. Because it allows me to check which photos are good and which ones are awful, real fast.

Once you execute your first filter, you can open the folder with the remaining images on Lightroom and start working! Import them and from here we will make the magic happens

In the “Library” module of Lightroom we can see the images and once we open one, we can click the key “D” to go to the “Develop” module and start having fun

The first thing I started fixing in every one of my photographs is the white balance. The fastest way to do it is to click on the dropper and then click on any white part of the picture.

That way you can fix the white balance or even lower it to make the image colder or use a higher value to make it warmer, you can even make from a normal sky a really colorful sunset or sunrise.

After that, I started reducing the highlights just in case the picture is overexposed.

Developing an image is something very subjective because the developing process can and will change depending on what you are trying to show or transmit.

But there are a few “musts” to check it before we add our own secret sauce. After tweaking the white balance and the highlights, you should move the “Blacks” slider to the left until you notice that the black point of the image is balanced.

After that, move the shadows but don’t abuse it. Now we are working with drone images, so it would be nice to go to the “Presence” sliders and test the “Texture”, “Clarity” and “Dehaze” sliders but don’t push them too hard to any side. Especially Dehaze. It could be catastrophic

If your image has a very white, maybe a little overexposed sky, try moving the highlights slider a little to the left and the dehaze a little to the right, that way you can recover info on the image.

At any time during the process, you can press the “Y” key to compare how your edit is going against your original image

When you feel you are done, let’s go to export that image!

The important part here is to know where our image is going to be used (or asking the minimum size that they need) and the file size. Remember that for most websites a small file size is crucial, totally different from exporting for print, as they absolutely don’t care about size and usually need the biggest resolution possible.

So? How do you like this little tutorial? Drop a link to see your edited images and let me know if you want to know more about editing!