DJI Mini 3 Pro – Change These 2 Settings For Better Sunset Video and Photos

Good day, folks. Shawn here from Air Photography. Today, we're going to talk about the DJI Mini 3 and two settings you can change in the options of the DJI Fly App to help you capture more vibrant, more natural-looking sunsets and sunrises.

Now, you may be brand new to drones. Perhaps you've got your very first drone, and you've put it up in the air to capture a beautiful sunset, and you just find that it looks a little drab, a little washed out. It's definitely not what you can see with the naked eye.

Ideally, to get a beautiful sunset, there's a lot of things you need to do and it can get very complicated. You want to film in a flat color profile, set all your own manual camera settings, and then do some intense color grading. But let's face it, not all of us are capable of doing that. That takes a lot of know-how and especially if you're just starting out on your journey.

DJI Mini 3 sunset settings in the DJI Fly app

So, let's go ahead and we'll take a look at these settings. It's super simple and easy, and you can have it set up in the DJI Fly app in seconds.

Now, the two things we're going to be adjusting here are our EV compensation and our white balance. So, let's take a look at some footage first. Here, without anything done, this is just all in Auto. You can see that we just have a standard sunset. There's nothing spectacular about it, and it's a little bit washed out. There's a little bit of color, but definitely, we can make that look a little bit better.

The first thing we're going to do here is adjust our EV compensation. We're going to take it down to either a negative 0.3 or a negative 0.7. Basically, that's the exposure. It's going to allow a little bit more color to come out. You can see, even just doing that one adjustment, we've already got a great improvement in the color, and it just looks a little bit better.

Now, the second thing we want to do is adjust our white balance. And this is something you should be doing anyways because lighting conditions change so frequently, your white balance can be all over the place if you leave it in Auto, and it can cause a lot of color shifting.

Now, if you don't know what to set it at for everyday filming, usually 5500 is a good place to start. That's kind of middle of the road, and it can make most lighting environments look pretty good. But for this scenario, for sunset or sunrise, we're going to want to turn the color temperature up.

So we can slide the slider, and it's going to give us a preview of what it looks like, and right away, you can see there's so much more color in the sky. There's more of a golden hue. So, this just is more personal taste than what you like. You don't want to set it up too high; otherwise, it does start to look a little unnatural.

But as you can see, with those two settings, the footage looks a lot better. Now, every sunset and sunrise is going to be a little bit different, so you might have to adjust it either way a little bit more or a little bit less.

So now, let's go ahead, and we'll play them side by side. On the right-hand side is before we changed these settings. You can see it looks very washed out, not a lot of color. And on the left-hand side is after we've adjusted the EV compensation and the white balance, and you can see it just looks a lot more pleasing, a lot more moody.

So, yeah, folks, that's basically it. Two simple settings can make your sunrises and sunsets look a little more appealing. This works for both photo and video modes, and you can adjust these settings for any camera or drone, not just the DJI Mini 3. It works with the DJI Mini 3 Pro, the DJI Mavic 3 series, the DJI Air 2 series, and even other cameras such as GoPros.

Well, folks, hopefully, you enjoyed this video and got some value out of it. Give it a thumbs up if you did. It's always greatly appreciated. We'll see you in the next one.