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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;2manybooks, post: 515412, member: 8267&quot;]It looks like the photo of Old Bets might have been the original picture meant for this oval frame. Does the oval image area fit nicely in the frame? (The photos of the man and woman seem to be off center - placed low in the framed area.)</p><p><br /></p><p>For the old man and woman, I have seen 1860&#039;s ambrotypes that use a similar layered effect. The photographic image is a negative on glass, and a backing layer of dark cloth or paper was used to make the image visible. Sometimes the backing layer was hand tinted/colored. But I have not seen it done with paper. I cannot tell how the paper may have been treated to make it transparent.</p><p><br /></p><p>The costumes of the old man and woman look consistent with an 1860s date, but there is the possibility that they are later printings from a glass negative. It would be helpful to know more about the papers used. Up until the early 1860s there were salted paper negatives and prints, but those do not have the clarity of these images. The only other photographic paper available in the 1860s was albumen coated papers (used in conjunction with glass negatives). Albumen papers are very thin, and usually supported on another heavier stock. (The Old Bets photo looks like it might be albumen.) Do the other prints look like the paper of Old Bets?</p><p><br /></p><p>Collodion and gelatin coated papers, which are heavier, do not appear until the mid 1880s.</p><p><br /></p><p>The colors look more like hand tinting, rather than being produced by an actual photographic process. The earliest color carbon printing&nbsp; process (1870s) was created by using separation negatives printed on a single sheet of paper - not layers of paper.</p><p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140720233757/http://image.eastmanhouse.org/files/GEH_1954_03_05.pdf" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140720233757/http://image.eastmanhouse.org/files/GEH_1954_03_05.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20140720233757/http://image.eastmanhouse.org/files/GEH_1954_03_05.pdf</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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