I’ve been flying drones for about five years, treating them like another lens in my landscape kit. My current drone is a DJI Air 2S, which has a one-inch sensor to give me a great 20 MP image. I like the drone as a tool because it can give me views that I would otherwise never see, so on most trips I get a horizontal amount of images. from his DSLR cameras and drones.
My processing has evolved over the years as new tools have been developed that can greatly aid my editing. I used to be just a Lightroom/Photoshop editor, but now, that’s changed.
For starters, and I probably don’t need to say it, but just in case, I always shoot raw. I needed all the data I could get, and funnily enough, DJI and most other drones deliver raw files right from the camera from the built-in microSD card.
For this tutorial, I took an image from a recent trip to Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, California. It’s a great location for landscape photography, and the Alabama Hills have been the filming location of many major movies, including How the West Was Won, Tremors, Iron Man, and hundreds of sci-fi and western films. . It’s drone-friendly, and usually you can pretty much have a place to yourself.
In capsule form, my workflow looks like this. Raw image into DxO PureRaw -> Adobe Camera Raw -> Photoshop -> Topaz Sharpen AI as PS plugin -> Luminar Neo as PS plugin -> then back to PS for final save and render to 16 bit TIFF and 8-bit JPEG for the web.
Let me go through the steps I take in depth.
My first stop is always DxO PureRAW 2. It’s a great utility, a must-have to start any image editing session. The staff at DxO have data on any lens/sensor combination and can correct any anomalies in your optical path, including cornering, fringing, and fringing. , optical distortion and more.
Happily, DxO recently added a line of DJI drones, so it automatically recognized my optics and sensors and corrected them. This process is automatic. It takes the camera/lens information from your metadata in the image and applies corrections. The result is always good corrections to geometry, removal of vignettes and some sharpening. The results are impressive and very positive, I wouldn’t be dealing with any drone images without a first stop with the DxO PureRAW. My screenshots don’t really represent the quality change as well if you can see the original file, but in split screen you can see the improvement. I’ve zoomed in 2x on this photo, so you can’t see how the DxO PureRAW deals with the vignettes in the corners, but they’re gone.
DxO software keeps images as DNGs, so images are set to automatically open in Photoshop, which forces Camera Raw to open at launch. My first workflow item there was to choose the Adobe Landscape profile, which is on most of my images, improved on the default camera profile.
I could also use a bit of collision with the dehaze tool, since the Sierra Nevada Mountains are pretty far away. From Adobe Camera Raw, I open the file with Photoshop.
Don’t touch the image at this point, I almost always add Topaz Sharpen AI. You may ask why an extra round of grinding is needed after the DxO PureRAW? The answer is that it is a different type of grinding. The DxO does some optical sharpening, but Topaz automatically senses some motion blur. It’s almost impossible to avoid if there’s any wind, and of course the drone’s propellers are creating some motion blur. Topaz corrects the blur and I almost always get a sharp image.
Then it’s time Luminar Neo contribution. I use it mainly as a Photoshop plugin. Neo is a fairly new product from Skylum and they recently added AI Masking, linear and radial gradients, among other improvements. I use AI enhancement tools sparingly, but they make a big difference. Neo outperforms Adobe with its sky replacement. I often come across what I call a “seriously clear” sky, which doesn’t provide much benefit to a landscape photo. Sometimes, I adjust my composition to avoid the sky, but here, in this wide drone view, I have replaced the sky. I always use my own sky and match the weather and time of day, so I think the change helped.
I also used the Neo color control to get the colors of the rocks close to what I saw when I was there. It’s a flimsy but useful adjustment. Here is the before and after.
If you look at the two images, you can see that the small changes add up. PureRAW provided me with a very clean DNG file. With Camera Raw in Photoshop, I was able to effectively de-expose, and the Topaz Sharpen AI fixed any motion blur caused by wind and drones. The Luminar Neo provided me with some nice color and contrast enhancements and corrections and allowed me to add one of the previously captured skies that I thought were made for a better image.
Drone cameras have come a long way, and some of the newer offerings for editors like DxO PureRAW and Topaz AI Sharpen along with Luminar Neo could have a noticeable impact. And I still use Photoshop and Lightroom in my edits. This is a great time to be a landscape photographer and drone photographers have better tools than ever. All the software and tools I use are available for both Mac and Windows computers.
