I’ve been shooting landscapes long enough to know that a bad forecast doesn’t just waste an afternoon. Out here in central Oregon, a blown forecast can mean a four-hour round trip for a grey, flat sky that gives you nothing. I’ve done it more times than I’ll admit. So when I stumbled on William Patino’s full sunset workflow video, shot on location in New Zealand, I wasn’t watching it as a beginner looking for basics. I was watching it as someone who wanted to see how another working professional thinks through the whole chain, from reading the sky two days out to making the final tone curve call in post.

What Patino lays out is a complete system. Not a trick. Not a preset. A repeatable process that connects weather data to compositional decisions to editing choices. That through-line is what makes this tutorial worth your time.

Reading the Sky Before You Leave the House

The forecasting section is where Patino earns the runtime. He leans on a combination of tools to assess whether a sunset is worth chasing, and the logic is straightforward once you hear it explained. Completely clear skies produce flat, boring light. Completely overcast skies block everything. The sweet spot is broken cloud cover, particularly high or mid-level clouds that can catch and hold colour during the golden hour window.

He uses a weather app alongside a cloud cover forecast tool to cross-reference conditions, looking specifically at what’s happening in the western sky in the hour before and after sunset. The key metric is cloud coverage percentage: somewhere in the 30 to 60 percent range, with the right altitude, is where the dramatic skies live. He also pays attention to the timing of any clearing. If a front is moving through, a sunset that falls right as clouds break can produce some of the most violent colour you’ll ever photograph. That’s the chase.

I’ve been doing a version of this for years, but Patino’s approach tightened my thinking around cloud altitude specifically. I was filtering mostly by percentage. Now I’m checking height layers more deliberately.

Wide Angle Lenses and the Trap They Set

Once Patino is on location in New Zealand, he talks through his lens choice and the compositional discipline that wide angles demand. He’s shooting wide, and he’s clear about why: a wide angle pulls the viewer into the scene and creates that sense of immersion that makes a landscape image feel like a place you could step into. But he also names the trap. A wide angle lens makes everything smaller. If you don’t have a strong foreground anchor, you end up with a vast, empty frame where the sky competes with nothing.

His fix is intentional foreground placement. He gets low, physically close to rocks, water, or textured ground, and uses that foreground element to create depth and lead the eye toward the light. He’s thinking in layers: foreground, midground, background. Each zone needs something. This isn’t a new concept, but watching him work through it in real time on a real location, adjusting his position by inches until the composition locks in, is a useful reminder that this is physical work. You move your feet. You get your knees wet. The camera goes where the composition demands it.

Exposure and Bracketing for a High-Contrast Sky

Patino shoots RAW and brackets his exposures at sunset, and he explains the reasoning clearly. A sunset scene can have eight or more stops of dynamic range between a bright sky and a dark foreground. No single exposure captures that cleanly. He typically shoots a base exposure for the foreground and a one to two stop underexposure to protect the highlights in the sky, giving him flexibility in post to blend or recover detail across the full tonal range.

He keeps his aperture in the f/8 to f/11 range for maximum depth of field across those foreground-to-background layers, drops his ISO as low as the light will allow to preserve clean shadow detail, and adjusts shutter speed to manage exposure. If there’s water in the frame, he considers whether a slower shutter will add smoothness or whether a faster one will freeze texture. Both are valid choices, but they’re choices, not accidents.

Processing the RAW File: Colour Without the Candy

The editing section is where a lot of sunset tutorials go wrong. They push saturation until the image looks like a movie poster. Patino doesn’t do that, and this is where I’d point anyone frustrated by their sunset edits.

He starts in Lightroom with the basics: pulling highlights, lifting shadows, and getting the exposure balanced across the frame. He uses the HSL panel with precision, adjusting the luminance and saturation of specific colour channels rather than the global saturation slider. He might warm the oranges slightly, reduce the luminance on the reds to keep them from blowing out, and desaturate the blues just enough to feel natural. The result looks like a sunset, not a screensaver.

He also uses a graduated filter or a masking tool to apply separate adjustments to the sky versus the foreground, which keeps the ground from looking grey and dead while the sky stays controlled.

Where I’d Push Back, Slightly

Patino’s workflow is built around reliable access to dramatic locations, and it shows. In New Zealand, the geography does a lot of work. The layered terrain, the coastline, the natural foreground texture. When I’m shooting high desert terrain in Oregon, some of that compositional framework has to flex. There are seasons here where the foreground is flat, dry scrub for fifty yards in every direction, and no amount of getting low turns it into a leading line. In those situations, I’ll shift toward isolating a single strong subject, a lone juniper, a volcanic rock formation, and letting the sky do more of the heavy lifting compositionally.

That’s not a criticism of his approach. It’s a reminder that every technique has a landscape it fits best.

The core lesson from Patino’s workflow is this: great sunset images are made before you press the shutter, through smart forecasting, deliberate positioning, and disciplined exposure. The editing only works if the RAW file gives it something to work with.

Watch the full tutorial from William Patino to see every step demonstrated on location in New Zealand. The visual detail of watching him move through a real shoot is something no written breakdown can fully replace.