Agfa Portriga

[Arthurwg]

Cadmium was the best plating for motorcycle parts. The ban has made it very difficult to properly restore a Vincent.

 

[DREW WILEY]

I was involved in lead mitigation trainings to thousands of contractors along with an EPA instructor in relation to the necessary licensing. I also sold the relevant equipment (German). And I have known quite a few who were not only themselves already seriously ill, but their wives and children too. Chelation could cost a family hundreds of thousands of dollars; and some health effects were permanent. Cadmium is even worse, though less common. I suspect quite a bit of cadmium now goes to the electronics industry - the new industrial polluters, as well as to military applications, one of the traditional polluters. Deprive "artistes" of it, and they'll just find some other way to stupidly poison themselves. They always have.

 

[Lachlan Young]

It’s still in artist paints. I still use them, although the cadmium-free versions are excellent (not exactly the same colours of course).

Effectively speaking, the bans apply to 'industrial' usage, rather than for 'traditional'/ craft-based processes where meaningful alternatives are impossible/ prohibitively expensive to make a 1:1 aesthetic/ functional equivalent etc - and where the quantities used are (supposedly) small enough to not be environmentally significant & used only by nominally responsible adults etc. I'm rather more concerned about the often seemingly casual use of Cd salts in wet plate etc than the various heavy metal pigments in oil paints etc - which tend to be well flagged up.

 

[Don_ih]

It’s still in artist paints. I still use them, although the cadmium-free versions are excellent (not exactly the same colours of course).

It's also still in billions of batteries.

 

[takilmaboxer]

I learned to do fine printing on Portriga back in the 1970s, and it remained my favorite paper right up until it disappeared. Over time I learned to use substitutes, notably Foma warm tone papers. Portriga's been gone so long that I don't miss it any more. But if the OP is lucky enough to have usable paper, they will miss it when it's gone. And when sea levels rise enough to infiltrate toxic waste dumps, people will still deny the reality of global warming.

 

[Mike Crawford]

I do intend to perform a fog test next print session.

I use amber safe lights in my darkroom. Is this paper compatible with amber or will I need red lights?

Even if it has some base fog, it should work very well with lith printing!!

 

[AgX]

With all this whining about the vanishing of Agfa Portriga, I wonder why nobody hinted at the Adox Polywarmtone emulsion, available since March.

 

[Jay Schrotenboer]

With all this whining about the vanishing of Agfa Portriga, I wonder why nobody hinted at the Adox Polywarmtone emulsion, available since March.

Don’t make me want to try another paper! I have enough learning to do!

 

[faberryman]

With all this whining about the vanishing of Agfa Portriga, I wonder why nobody hinted at the Adox Polywarmtone emulsion, available since March.

ADOX describes Polywarmtone II as "naturally warm, beige-green, high-definition, extremely vintage-looking emulsion". A "beige-green" paper didn't really sound interesting to me. I am looking at a couple of prints I made on Portriga and they don't look beige-green to me. If someone has made a print on Polywarmtone II and could scan and post it, that would be great.

 

[AgX]

I wondered about that statement at their manual. At their website they say explicitly that it got no green hue.

 

[faberryman]

It looks like I'll have to spend some time tracking it down. B&H and Adorama don't carry it. Freestyle has the liquid emulsion but not the paper.

 

[AgX]

No one has that paper for sale, as it has not even made yet. To their saying they are still busy with fine tuning of the production-coating process. Last update was in July.

 

[Don_ih]

Polywarmtone is not based on any Agfa paper but on a Forte paper (namely, Polywarmtone). Adox had plans to release it as a paper but the Covid situation complicated things, so they released it as a liquid emulsion.
I have perfectly fine Agfa Portriga paper (not rapid or speed, though - I think every pack of that stuff is fogged). If you want to use a restrainer to hold back fog, potassium bromide is a better choice than benzo, since benzo will cool the tone of the paper. Bromide will, if anything, warm the paper tone. You can use a bit of both ....

In any case, I’m too tired to worry about cadmium etc. etc. I’m in a very small minority but I really just don’t care about this stuff anymore. Other problems.

Gotta agree.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Portriga had a unique look. There is no direct substitute. But I do have a viable strategy for reprinting the same old images on MGWT properly developed for an analogous (but not identical) look.