I was doing some research on shrimp pigment and found out that shrimp color- such as different types of albinism is not related to melanin; that's a mammal thing. Instead, crustation pigments are all carotenoids.
Not surprising when you think about it, and something which I guessed already.
However upon further research I found why astaxanthin causes color change. In my past experiment with neo yellows, feeding astax causes a color shift from yellow to greenish to blue to brown. Why is this so, when in fish it can make them redder?
The answer lay in how the molecule is constructed. When astaxanthin is relaxed it is red, when compacted it is blue. In crustations it does not occur in it's basic relaxed form when eaten; instead it’s mostly bound to a protein called crustacyanin that causes it to compact. Thus causing a bathochromic shift. In other words, since this string winds up being crumpled up and forced into into another molecule, it behaves as a blue/brown pigment.
An example of this is a normal brownish lobster. Cook that lobster and it turns red. Why? Because the protein that compresses the astaxanthin is broken and the astax then is free to go to relaxed form.
So color of the tissue/shell is from differing amounts of free and bound astax in different layers of the shell, how thick the shell is, and whether astaxanthin is closer to the surface or in a deeper layer.