DJI

How to Grade DJI D-Log M Drone Footage in DaVinci Resolve

D-Log M is DJI’s middle ground between flat log footage and the finished look of Normal mode. It records 10-bit color with more contrast and saturation baked in than full D-Log, so it’s easier to grade, and it keeps much more room in the highlights and shadows than Normal. If your drone has it, use it for anything you plan to edit.

You’ll find it on the DJI Mini 4 Pro, the DJI Mini 5 Pro, the Air 3, the DJI Air 3S, the DJI Avata 2 and all three cameras of the DJI Mavic 4 Pro, which also has full D-Log.

Get it right in the air

Grading starts with exposure. D-Log M footage straight out of the drone looks gray and dull, which tempts people to underexpose so the screen looks “right”. Don’t. Shadows that went too dark come back noisy.

Watch the histogram, not the image. Expose as bright as you can without clipping the sky. Auto exposure tends to protect the sky and leave the ground too dark, so on contrasty days set exposure manually. Lock white balance to a fixed value, such as 5600K in daylight, so it doesn’t drift mid-shot and leave you matching clips later.

Shoot at the lowest ISO, and use an ND filter to keep the shutter near double the frame rate.

The quick way, DJI’s LUT

DJI publishes a free D-Log M to Rec.709 LUT for each model on its download pages. Drop it on a clip in Resolve and you get a normal-looking image in one click.

Put the LUT last, not first. Do your corrections on earlier nodes, then add the LUT on the final node or at the timeline level. If you apply it first, you’re grading an image that’s already had its highlights squeezed.

Be aware that on high-contrast scenes the LUT can crush the ground into near-black. When that happens, lift the shadows on a node before the LUT.

The careful way, a manual grade

Resolve’s color space transform handles full DJI D-Log natively. For D-Log M there’s no official preset, so many editors skip the transform and grade it by hand like flat Rec.709 footage. It works fine because D-Log M isn’t a true log curve.

A simple order on separate nodes:

  1. Exposure and white balance. Fix these first, using the scopes.
  2. Contrast. A small bump, around 1.05, goes a long way.
  3. Saturation. Use HSV saturation or the color warper instead of the global saturation slider, which turns skies cyan and grass radioactive.
  4. Look. A LUT or a creative grade, last.

Match clips shot in the same light before you start styling. Two drone shots of the same coast should look like they came from one day.

Common mistakes

Underexposing and hoping to fix it later. Pushing global saturation. Heavy color shifts that make water look green. Too much added grain on aerials, where clean skies show it badly. And grading on a laptop screen in a bright room, then wondering why it looks different on a phone.