Best Selenium Toner?

[John Wiegerink]

I bought a bottle of Bellini selenium toner a while back to keep up at my cottage. It work just as good as the Kodak selenium toner down home. Yes, I would buy it again!

 

[mshchem]

I use selenium toner on most every print. I'm after the increase in the blacks, and the color change more than worries about permanence. On cold neutral papers I use KRST mixed 1+3 (25%) warm tone, chloride papers require much more dilute solution. On occasion I will make up Kodak Blue Toner, gold, it's amazing to see it's effect on warm tone paper, it does make everything look good, cost is prohibitive.

I'm curious to hear what concentration members here are using with selenium toner and for what specific paper?

 

[Bill Burk]

I’ve got a couple prints from George Fiske which were spotted. The spotting is still black but the rest of the albumen print has faded to brown. I would rather have the faded brown image than a completely faded image. In that respect a toned print is good even if the silver image fades.

 

[GregY]

I use selenium toner on most every print. I'm after the increase in the blacks, and the color change more than worries about permanence. On cold neutral papers I use KRST mixed 1+3 (25%) warm tone, chloride papers require much more dilute solution. On occasion I will make up Kodak Blue Toner, gold, it's amazing to see it's effect on warm tone paper, it does make everything look good, cost is prohibitive.

I'm curious to hear what concentration members here are using with selenium toner and for what specific paper?

Kodak Selenium toner. Last year i finished a gallon I had bought 20 yrs ago.
My normal dilution is 1 + 19
I wish there were more cold tone papers around....

 

[mshchem]

Kodak Selenium toner. Last year i finished a gallon I had bought 20 yrs ago.
My normal dilution is 1 + 19
I wish there were more cold tone papers around....

I have been gifted 1 qt glass bottles of Kodak selenium toner, the stuff is at least 50 years old, made in Rochester New York United States of America! When an old studio closed seemed like there was always selenium toner and hypo clearing agent

 

[RalphLambrecht]

Basic fixers are said to be easier to wash off the paper because they keep the gelatin swollen. Acid environments tend to cause the gelatin to contract. That's why a basic fixer may theoretically be removed from the gelatin easier and faster. However, the biggest problem is removing the fixer and its by-products not from the gelatin, but from the paper's fibers. That's what the hypo-clearing agent is really useful for.
So personally I wouldn't skip the hypo-clear even if I used a basic fixer (which I do, actually).

I still don't understand why some selenium toners contain fixer. Assuming we start with a well processed print, there should be no silver halides there to fix, either before or after toning. So why add fixer to the toner?

I assume Vlad means alkaline when he refers to 'basic' fixers as in base vs acid?

 

[Raghu Kuvempunagar]

I still don't understand why some selenium toners contain fixer. Assuming we start with a well processed print, there should be no silver halides there to fix, either before or after toning. So why add fixer to the toner?

A Selenium toner typically has three components - Sodium Selenite, Ammonium Thiosulphate and Sodium Sulphite/Metabisulphite. Without Ammonium Thiosulphate, the activity of Selenium toner is extremely weak. Thiosulphate in the toner forms a soluble Silver-Thiosulphate complex with the metallic Silver and the toner reacts with this complex to form insoluble Silver Selenide at the point of dissolution. The amount of Thiosulphate in the toner determines the rate of dissolution of Silver and consequently the rate of toning. Without Thiosulphate in the toner, the dissolution of Silver by Sodium Sulphite alone is extremely slow and toning will be very weak.