Al Shaw t206 blue uniform variation...

[Pat R]

okay maybe not blue but the middle one is bluish compared to most Shaw examples
all three are Piedmont 150's

Shaw Uniform Colors.jpg

[sando69]

yes, pat.
it does look bluish to me, too.
also seems to be a wee bit out of register.
perhaps steve b. will weigh in.

[steve B]

A higher res scan would show for sure, but it looks like either the lighter blue was printed as a bluish gray, or was all over instead of halftone or only in certain areas.

150's were redone 2-3 times, most differences aren't really noticeable.
Same for 350's

[steve B]

Zoomed to 250%.

If you look at where the one color of the hand goes below the border, you can see the left and right ones are brownish gray, while the middle is bluish gray.

So a different ink color.
I can't see enough detail to see if the layers were different.

[Pat R]

Here are some 1200 dpi crops of a few areas Steve.

[steve B]

That's pretty clear.

On the blue one, especially on the first pair and the pair showing the hat you can see how the dark blue is all over instead of just highlights for shading.

One way that can happen is a dry plate, where there isn't enough wetting to repel ink from places you don't want printed.
But the big key with that is that it's usually in either small unprinted areas, like between frame lines on a Piedmont Reverse, or if a larger area it ranges from haphazard and sloppy looking to literally everywhere being printed, including borders. That's not happening here.

I believe the actual art was changed, a nice example of a running change in the 150's.
I think the blue one will be the older one, perhaps a change to use less blue to save ink, or if the uniforms weren't dark, to fix an error.