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Posted By: David

The natural color for albumen print photographs (the kind used on all the 19th century real photo tobacco cards) was ordinarilly white with purple/brown colors that, with age, yellowed to the typical sepia color that we are now familiar. In the 1880s, there was invented a process where they could add a dye during the process of making the photograph. While other colors (blue, green, yellow, etc) could be added, pink was technically the easiest. In my experience, the pink albumen prints often, though not always, have too light images. I suspect that the pink Old Judges were experiments. The photographers probably decided that adding the dye was too much trouble and/or the images didn't turn out well.