A Distant View of Portland +Edit

AlanLichty

Moderator
A couple of nights ago while shooting a sunset from above my house I decided to aim my camera south towards downtown Vancouver and Portland in the distance using a 168mm telephoto lens set for 50MP resolution. I haven't been terribly impressed with the 168mm lens in 50MP mode before since DxO didn't recognize the RAW files and wouldn't process them. The RAW file definitely needed something like PureRAW from my perspective. That seemed odd since all of the other possible lenses and available resolutions worked just fine in both Photolab as well as PureRAW and the drone has been out since last May. As it turned out DxO just released a new update for both applications and they now do recognize the RAW files for the 168mm lens shooting in 50MP mode.

I have taken quite a few images looking towards Portland from over my house with both the 162mm telephoto on my Mavic 3 and 166mm with the Mavic 3 Pro and while you tell there were buildings in the distance nothing could really be resolved. I didn't expect much beyond that from the 168mm lens on the Mavic 4 Pro until I pulled the image up on my monitor and tried running it through PureRAW. The light right around sunset was rather lousy for a shot of downtown Portland so the fact that I could the city this well was a very pleasant surprise for me. This isn't quite zoomed in to a 100% crop but is fairly close to it so the effective focal length is well beyond 168mm. For the record downtown Portland is just over 12 miles away.

DJI_M4P_168_DwntwnPDX121225.jpg


C&C always welcome.

Edit: it appears I was hasty to blame DxO for not recognizing the 50MP output from the 168mm camera on the drone. I went back to some of the shots I took when I first got the drone on Dec. 1 when I was first testing it out and DxO still can't process them. There have also been several updates to the drone itself since I first got it so DJI must have changed something with the 168mm camera system this month to make this work better.

I was hoping to find a shot taken in better light using the 168mm/50MP combination to see how well that worked but it looks like I will have to wait a bit for another opportunity when the sun makes a return visit.

Edit 2:

I decided to see what I could tease out of this in Photolab 8 since it might be a while before I get another good window to fly/shoot. This pushed the light balance quite a bit over what was the actual available light along with a bit more work on the overall color balance. This is close to the edge for what I can do with this capture without being in danger of being reported to the ASPCP (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Pixels) :)

DJI_M4P_168_DwntwnPDX121225-3.jpg
 
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Jameel Hyder

Moderator
Staff member
Even in the less than ideal light the details look decent. Good to know dxo handles these raw files. On a cloudy day the diffused light should provide you with an opportunity to see what how it fares as well.

Surprised that were several updates in about 2 weeks.
 

AlanLichty

Moderator
Even in the less than ideal light the details look decent. Good to know dxo handles these raw files. On a cloudy day the diffused light should provide you with an opportunity to see what how it fares as well.

Surprised that were several updates in about 2 weeks.
Thanks Jameel - this was about 10 minutes after the sun dropped over the horizon so true blue light hour. DxO did fine with all of the output options except the 50MP with the 168mm lens. The 50MP shots caused PureRAW to crash if I tried to use the Preview and Process option. Photolab treated it as if it were a jpeg and wouldn't apply the DeepPrime 3 denoise. I usually expect multiple updates for something I just yanked out of the box but in this case I got another set up updates this last week including one for the drone firmware and I think that's the one that fixed these RAW files. Nothing in the release notes about this beyond "Fixed some known issues".
 

AlanLichty

Moderator
That's sure a cool view Alan. You should shoot that more often.
Thanks Jim - shooting this view wasn't really possible with the Mavic 3 Pro so I am seeing this for the first time with the Mavic 4 Pro. I will be looking for more opportunities going forward. Moving closer by driving south of my area plops me down into areas that have restrictions due to the flight paths for PDX air traffic.
 
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