How to Color Grade Drone Footage

Most DJI drones and gimbal cameras offer three colour modes, and the choice decides how much grading you need.

• Normal: ready to post, with contrast and saturation baked in. Least work, least room to change it.
• HLG: a high dynamic range format that looks natural on HDR screens and is easy to show on SDR. Browsers usually convert tagged HLG themselves; use HLG (Rec.2100) in Footage only if it opens flat and grey.
• D-Log M: a flat 10-bit log mode designed for grading, with more highlight and shadow range than Normal. It looks washed out until converted.

If you plan to grade, D-Log M is the better choice on drones that offer it, because the extra range lets you recover skies and keep shadows clean. If you want to post straight from the controller, Normal is fine.

DJI has not published the maths behind D-Log M, so the studio’s D-Log M (approximate) conversion is a close match rather than an exact one. For most clips it is a good starting point. When you need an exact conversion, for example to match a shot to footage converted elsewhere, use DJI’s own LUT.

Get DJI’s conversion LUT

DJI publishes a D-Log M to Rec.709 LUT on the download page of each product that records D-Log M (look under the product’s Downloads or Software section on DJI’s site). Download the one for your model, since they are made per camera.

Use it in the studio

Leave Footage on Standard video (Rec.709), open Creative and choose Import LUT with the DJI .cube file. Set Apply LUT to Before the grade and keep LUT intensity at 100%. Everything you do in Adjust and the looks then works on correctly converted footage.

Why aerials look hazy

Light scattered by the air between the drone and the ground adds a veil of brightness that grows with distance, so the far half of a landscape has lifted blacks and less colour than the foreground. A single global Blacks and Contrast move clears most of it. For a stronger effect only in the distance, a Gradient window on a Secondary layer can add contrast to the top half of the frame.

Skies

A bright sky is usually the first thing to clip. Bring Highlights down before reaching for anything else, and check the Waveform so clouds sit below the top line. To deepen the blue, use the Sky qualifier preset in Secondary and lower that layer’s Exposure a little, or shift the Blue band in HSL down in luminance.

Grass, trees and fields

Small sensors tend to render vegetation as a uniform, saturated green. Moving the Green band slightly towards yellow and lowering its saturation gives a more natural, varied result; Yellow controls dry grass and autumn colour separately. In the evening, the warm light already does much of this for you.

Aerials shot minutes apart can differ a lot as the drone turns towards or away from the sun. Grade the best-looking shot first, then in Match grab a still of it with Grab still (G) and use Match to this still on the next clip as a starting point. Copy grade (Shift+C) and Paste grade (Shift+V) carry a finished grade to the next file opened in this browser.

To reuse a grade across a whole project in another editor, export it with Export .cube; the LUT generator explains what goes into the file.

In Resolve, apply DJI’s LUT to the first node (or use a Color Space Transform on footage whose curve Resolve lists, such as D-Log), correct exposure and haze in the next node, then add skies and greens with a qualifier or window in a third. Our DaVinci Resolve guide walks through the node layout.