I think that is exactly what you need to do.
My Golds have this "Iced Tea" color to them. A kind of transparent brown overlaying the yellow-white color. I have never seen that before in a "Gold" and I wonder if their mutation is not the same as that of what most Golds are. Again, these pictures don't show that color very well but it does show a lot of the yellow on the fish on the left. Philippine Blue Angelfish are also hard to photograph in much the same way. My profile pic is a Philippine Blue but almost none of the blue showed up in that picture. Despite that, the same photo won the October photo contest and the 2012 yearly photo contest on "The Angelfish Forum II" website.
The batch of gold JD's I raised up showed the same ice tea overlay at times. It was a mood thing. Sometimes they had it, others times not so much. At the time I too thought maybe the group I was raising was different than others and it turned out to be a mood color pattern thing. Here are some OLD pictures of the last batch of Gold JD's I raised up. I appologize for the poor quality pictures - it is the best I have been able to do with our point and shoot camera.
The first one is out of focus, but shows the amount of pink/red in them when they are smaller:
Here is one with better focus showing the start of blue spangles:
Here are some showing a little bit of the darker color pattern. It is hard to capture, but I think you can get the idea:
OK - now fast forward to when they are a little bigger:
And again:
And here is the last photos I took of the group - the smaller female is right in the middle of the mix - you can see the blue on her chin if you look closely. There are some standard JD's in the picture as well for comparison.
Not trying to steal your thread - just trying to show the many color changes of this fish. I hope this helps...
