![\"swainson's](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/swainsons-hawk-8132-ron-dudley.jpg\")
<\/p>\nSometimes my eye is fooled by my first or even subsequent glances at an image.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
1\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n I photographed this light morph Swainson’s Hawk 10 days ago in southwest Montana.\u00a0 When I first saw the image\u00a0on my big screen after returning home my initial impression was that the head was slightly\u00a0soft\u00a0so I passed it by and a few days later while I was culling images I almost deleted it. But something made me take a closer look and it was only then that I began to suspect that my eye was being fooled by that funky-looking catch light.<\/p>\n One of the ways that I’ve always judged image sharpness is by evaluating the catch lights in the eyes. A pinpoint catch light is one indicator that the image (or at least that part<\/em> of the image) is sharp. But this catch light is different – to my eye, at this resolution,\u00a0it almost looks\u00a0like a double catch light with the two components right next to each other which makes it look blurry to me. So I\u00a0wondered if my eye was being fooled into thinking the entire head was slightly soft because the catch light appeared\u00a0to be soft.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n So as a test I decided to reprocess the image\u00a0and remove part of the catch light to make what was left\u00a0of it appear sharper\u00a0and see if it made a difference to my overall impression of the sharpness of the head. It did. In my judgment the entire bird, including the head, now looks more than acceptably sharp. The only difference between these first two\u00a0images is a few cloned pixels in the catch light in the second image.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n A massive crop reveals what I did. After resizing the entire\u00a0image to 900 pixels wide for web presentation and then cropping to show only the head this is what the first version of the image looks like. At this resolution each tiny square in the image is a single pixel. The original catch light consists of 7 pixels.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n After cloning and toning down\u00a0several pixels of the catch light this is what it looks like in the second image.<\/p>\n Normally I never alter catch lights in my work flow. I don’t add them if they’re not\u00a0in\u00a0the original image\u00a0and I don’t do sneaky\u00a0little things with them at the pixel level (though I do occasionally brighten or tone down a catch light that already exists).<\/p>\n But this\u00a0was an experiment. I was quite surprised to learn that my perception of the sharpness of the head of the bird was being influenced by the apparent<\/em> softness of the original catch light. I’ve never been highly skilled at evaluating sharpness anyway so learning another technique for doing it more accurately was a valuable lesson for me.<\/p>\n I’m curious to know if the first impression of others is that the head of the hawk in the first image is less than sharp and that sharpness there seems<\/em> to be improved by the changes I made in the catch light in the second version of the image.<\/p>\n![\"swainson's](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/swainsons-hawk-8132-b-ron-dudley.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"swainson's](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/swainsons-hawk-8132-huge-crop-ron-dudley.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"swainson's](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/swainsons-hawk-8132b-huge-crop.jpg\")
<\/p>\n