Alternative too Gold Toner

[David Lingham]

Due to the increasing high cost of gold toner, almost £80 a litre here in the UK. I’m trying to find a viable alternative that will give the same results. I’ve already tried making up a variety of Iron blue toners and found them messy, unpredictable, hard to control and mostly too bright. Ideally, what I’m looking for is an indirect blue toner that has a controllable bleach stage. Has anyone got any ideas please?

 

[pentaxuser]

David have a good look around all the sites such as Silverprint, Firstcall, AgPhotographic, etc I am sure I recall recently seeing gold toner much cheaper than £80 per litre.

Best of luck

pentaxuser

 

[David Lingham]

Thank you Pete, a quick check has shown they have recently come down in price. But they are still expensive and I would like to find an alternative, if I can.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Gold toner is actually inexpensive to use. You don't need much. Lots of the published formulas call for way more concentration than is necessary, and far more volume per session than necessary. I don't know the current exchange rate, but 100ml of gold chloride sells for around
$75 here and seems to last me about a year (I mostly print 16x20 and 20x24 prints). You just mix your own from the classic GP1 formula, but
use it weaker for longer in the tray. Same effect. But if you go purchase brand-name pre-mixed formulas, of course you're going to pay thru
the nose. It's easy to make up the A&B components yourself and save a bundle of money.

 

[David Lingham]

thank you Drew

 

[Ian Grant]

Another alternative is to use a dye-coupler toner. Essentially you use a re-halogenating bleach then re-develop in a colour developer with the relevant dye coupler added to get colour you want. Tetenal used to make a kit, I used to make up my own solutions, including a simple colour developer.

The blue coupler is α-naphthol (1-Naphthol) which is easy to get hold of. Bob Carlos Clarke used dye-coupler toners for many of his images in Dark Summer.

Ian

 

[pdeeh]

I've seen you refer to this method in a few posts Ian.
Are there any reasonably accessible (online or book) sources for "how to" ?

 

[Ian Grant]

I've seen you refer to this method in a few posts Ian.
Are there any reasonably accessible (online or book) sources for "how to" ?

Not that I know of. The technique was published in the 1930's in a British Journal of Photography article, it was in the Almanac the following year (can't remember which offhand).

I did upload an article to the Formulae (Articles) section here on APUG but it was lost a few years ago during a software upgrade, I'll see if I have it as a Word/Open Office document.

Ian

 

[pasiasty]

almost £80 a litre here in the UK

fotoimpex has Tetenal for 56.70 euro/l

BTW: does anybody know how much gold it contains? formulas say from 0.25 to 1 g of gold chloride per litre - if Tetenal contains 1 g, it's relatively cheap, one wouldn't save much mixing their own; but if it's 0.25 g or less, mixing may be reasonable.

 

[pdeeh]

The technique was published in the 1930's in a British Journal of Photography article, it was in the Almanac the following year (can't remember which offhand).

I should have checked my odd copies of BJP Annual before asking.
There are a couple of pages in the 1965 edition, with formulae and processing notes.
I'll have a go at scanning & converting to text when I have a minute, and upload to the articles section.