There’s a specific kind of editing panic that hits when a shot is already beautiful straight out of camera. You open the RAW file, the colors are wild, the light is doing something genuinely magical, and suddenly every adjustment feels like you’re either underselling it or wrecking it. I hit that exact wall last spring shooting golden hour along the Cumberland River. The sky was doing everything right. I did too much in post. The final image looked like a screensaver.

That experience is exactly why this William Patino tutorial landed so hard for me when I watched it.

Patino shot a sunrise with a rainbow arching over a single tree. It’s the kind of frame that could go wrong in five different directions in post. Instead, he walks through exactly how he protects what the camera captured while still shaping the image with intention. That balance is what makes this worth studying.

Why RAW Files Contain More Than You Think You’re Seeing

The first thing Patino reinforces, and it’s worth repeating because editors forget it constantly, is that the RAW file preview you see on import is not the actual data. It’s a JPEG render the camera baked in. The real information sitting underneath that preview, in the shadows, in the highlight rolloff, in those transitional sky tones, is significantly richer.

His approach from the start is to expand what’s already there before reaching for any creative color work. That means pulling highlights down early, often dramatically. In a sunrise or rainbow scenario, the sky can blow out fast, and recovering it in Lightroom’s tone curve or through the Highlights slider reveals gradients that genuinely change the mood of the whole image. He’s not manufacturing drama. He’s uncovering it.

This is foundational. If you start color grading before you’ve properly exposed the RAW data, you’re painting on top of a compressed version of your file. Everything downstream gets muddier.

Working the Light Before Touching Color

Patino’s processing order is deliberate and it mirrors what I’d consider best practice for any high-dynamic-range outdoor scene. He addresses luminosity first: bringing up shadows to open the foreground, pulling highlights to protect the sky, and then using the whites and blacks sliders to set contrast anchors without blowing anything out.

The Dehaze slider comes in carefully here. It’s useful for cutting atmospheric haze in landscape shots but it’s also one of the fastest ways to make a sunrise look like it was shot through a heavy filter. Patino treats it as a tool with a short leash. A small move, maybe 10 to 15 points, adds depth without turning the image into something theatrical and false.

Once the tones are set, he moves into the HSL panel, which is where the rainbow really becomes a post-processing conversation. The orange and red channels in a sunrise file carry enormous weight. Boosting saturation there selectively, while keeping yellows and blues more restrained, lets the warm light feel earned rather than pumped up. He also works the luminance sliders to control how bright specific hues appear, which is a more surgical way to shape the mood than just dragging the overall Vibrance slider up.

Masking the Sky and the Tree Separately

One of the more practical techniques Patino demonstrates is using Lightroom’s masking tools to treat different parts of the frame as separate editing zones. The sky and the lone tree silhouette need different treatment. The sky benefits from cooler white balance to emphasize the rainbow’s color separation. The tree and foreground want slightly warmer tones to anchor the image and give it weight.

Using a gradient mask on the sky and a separate radial or luminance-based mask on the tree, he can shift the color temperature of each zone without either fighting the other. This is especially important with rainbow shots because the colors in the arc are spectrally precise. If you warm the whole image, you push the blues and greens in the rainbow toward muddy territory. Masking lets you keep the rainbow honest while still giving the foreground the warmth it needs.

The technique isn’t complicated but it does require resisting the instinct to make one global white balance decision and call it done.

Where I’d Push Back on This Approach

Patino’s method is disciplined and it works cleanly for the image he’s editing. My one honest counter here is that this workflow assumes a fairly stable, single-light-source scene. When I’m shooting in Nashville during those transitional weather moments, which is where the best light actually lives, I often have two or three competing light sources: a warm sunrise from one direction, blue-hour ambient from another, and sometimes artificial city light spilling into the lower frame.

In those cases, masking alone isn’t enough to keep the color relationships coherent. I end up leaning on color grading in the tone curve’s individual channel controls, pulling the shadows toward a cooler or warmer cast depending on which color I want to recede, rather than keeping them neutral. It’s a more aggressive move and it doesn’t apply to Patino’s clean sunrise scenario. But for mixed-light editing, it fills a gap his tutorial doesn’t cover, because it isn’t trying to.

The Real Lesson Sitting Inside This Tutorial

The most transferable idea here isn’t any specific slider setting. It’s the sequencing: expose the RAW data fully before making creative decisions, and protect the colors the camera already captured before you start adding your own. That order of operations separates edits that look grounded from edits that look processed.

Watch the full video to see exactly how Patino works the rainbow tones in real time, because the visual before/after comparisons make the HSL adjustments click in a way that written instructions can only approximate.