ADOX MCP312 and Selenium

Just started seriously using this paper and I love it - great tonal scale and super blacks.

Anyway - just ran off a couple largish prints tonight. I threw one in selenium at 1:9 and it turned a very not nice eggplant color.

Does anyone else have experience with this paper and selenium? Just looking for a general guideline as to better dilution strengths - I love the look of this paper untoned, so I don't want much of a color shift.

Thanks!

OK - just got back from doing more tests and I arrived at the answer. I am posting here as a reference should someone else need this information. After drying the magenta tone was not as bad as it initially looked, but is still pronounced compared to other coldtone papers.

Here are the results I arrived at:

1:9 - 5 minutes - produced pronounced magenta tone
1:12 Not noticable difference from 1:9
1:20 5 minutes - produced a split-tone effect where lighter tones stayed cold, dark tones turned magenta - very unappealing
1:30 8 minutes - Nirvana! D-Max increased, no strong magenta cast.

1:30 seems to be the magic formula if you do not want a pronounced magegenta cast. I ran it for 8 minutes to be sure of good archival treatment. After seeing the dry prints, I do not mind the magenta cast so much at 1:12 although I did not care for it with this particular image and I may use it in the future. At 1:20 the split-tone effect was very ugly to me (and I like split tone) as it gives a green/magenta appearance to the print.

Hopefully this information can be helpful for others using this paper.

Would be nice to know which selenium toner you used!

Philippe Grunchec said:

Would be nice to know which selenium toner you used!

Click to expand...

Kodak Rapid. I should also note that I developed this paper in Dektol standard dilution.

I hope that users of this paper and selenium toners other than Kodak's will post on their findings. If it turns out that the problem doesn't arise with other selenium toners it would be nice to know.

pentaxuser

I was toning some prints on other paper yesterday and remembered reading this thread so I put in a print on MCP 312 also developed in Dektol.

I toned with a 1:20 dilution for ~7 minutes - KRST. After drying, I inspected the print side by side with an otherwise identical untoned version. The toned version had somewhat increased D-Max and a decidedly cooler tone. Side by side the toned print looked to have the noted slight purplish tone; however, later when viewed alone it simply looked somewhat neutral to cool. Going back to a side by side comparison, the untoned print had slight yellowish warm tone and the toned print again looked ever so slightly purple.

So - I think developed in Dektol and toned as per the above, the print on its own is simply cool in tone. I think somehow it is just the comparison and how one perceives "relative" color that brings out the purple. I would fully expect stronger dilutions to bring out the purple color more as seen by the OP.

In the future I would definitely use the 1:30 dilution for this paper developed in Dektol to enhance the D-Max but to also keep a warm tone.

I always use Selenium toners at 1:20 or 1:30 anywhere from 3-6 minutes. The tone turned cold (slightly purple when wet, then revert to neutral black when dry). The Dmax is visibly increased with a slight whitening on the highlights.

I use the LegacyPro Selenium Toner (from freestyle) and I've used it on Ilford MGIV and Arista Private Reserve (Adox or Fotokemika ??).