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Best see in larger size over dark background (click image above)

One of the objects d'art I saw in Bengaluru, India. This is the lid of a small silver box about 9" in diameter.

I nailed the focus on the peacock at f/2, which was my goal, but in hindsight, I should have given it a little more DOF to pull more of the lid into focus. That would have reduced the color fringing, too.

BTW, I have noticed with fast lenses wide open, bright edges to the front of perfect focus print with magenta fringes, and bright edges just behind perfect focus print with green fringes. This is not chromatic aberration - this happens even with apochoromatically corrected lenses with aspherical elements, like the Leica APO Summicron ASPH 90/2, or the Leica APO Macro Summarit-S 120/2.5. If anyone can explain it, please share your insights!

I remember this as "MPG", for Magenta-Perfect-Green, and use this as an aid while manually focusing. Sometimes it is easy to see the color fringing in the viewfinder, and it can be used to nail the correct focus - if you see a Magenta fringing in your subject, your are focusing behind your subject a little; and if you see a Green fringing to your subject, you are focusing a little in front of your subject!

You can also use this technique to test the accuracy of autofocus on your camera and lens (f/2 or faster). If you thought you had accurately focused on your subject, but see slight defocus, then look for a possible color fringing, especially at the edge of any bright areas. If you find either green or magenta, you know if your camera / lens combination has a front or rear focusing error that needs to be fine tuned.

Here, the color transition switched from magenta to green from the front to the rear of the peacock, so that was about as close as I could be. Below is a crop of actual pixels. This was processed with "Camera Vivid" profile in LR3, and by using "Camera Neutral", I could minimize the color fringing, but I can't fully get rid of it (see further down below).

Nikon D700 + Carl Zeiss Makro Planar T* 2/100 ZF.2
ND1_2168

As I finalize the design of my 28" soft box design, I made a silver version to try to decrease light loss over the white version I built first.
I fired off a few test shots, but was surprised by some of the results I got.

The images from the white box were consistently a little brighter than those from the silver. All settings and conditions were the same. The light distribution on the front of the silver version what not as good as the white - that didn't really surprise me. The slightly cooler color of the silver box was expected.

Reflector panels with the same silver surface are clearly brighter than the white foam core side, but that isn't helping the soft box put out more light. Don't know why.