Centennial Printing Out Paper

I want to try the Centennial Printing Out Paper. However, most of the prints I've seen have an orange/brown color, but I've seen a few that were neutral and even slightly blue/black. Does any know how to make the paper shift to neutral and blue/black? I've read that can be achieved with extended toning in gold. Thanks.

Use borax (20 Mule Team from the grocery store works great) instead of the ammonium thiocyanate that you get in the CAW toning kit. There are instructions in the kit for different gold chloride toner variations.

Tim Boehm said:

I want to try the Centennial Printing Out Paper. However, most of the prints I've seen have an orange/brown color, but I've seen a few that were neutral and even slightly blue/black. Does any know how to make the paper shift to neutral and blue/black? I've read that can be achieved with extended toning in gold. Thanks.

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Platinum toning is good and gives yellowish-to-neutral images -- but it's hellish expensive.

You could also try Selenium toning- I've used it on pt/pd and gotten a very deep cold black, but it absolutely kills the selenium toner- one batch is only good for a few prints.

Tim Boehm said:

I want to try the Centennial Printing Out Paper. However, most of the prints I've seen have an orange/brown color, but I've seen a few that were neutral and even slightly blue/black. Does any know how to make the paper shift to neutral and blue/black? I've read that can be achieved with extended toning in gold. Thanks.

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This link should help you out:
http://www.albumenworks.com/popcolorsequence.html

Try Clerc's thiourea-gold toner described on Wynn White's page on Van Dyke Brownprints . It lasts longer than the borax toner and gives a purplish tone quicker.

Joe

Tetenal Gold toner works just great, and lasts a long time.

I've never managed to get anything usable from Selenium toner.

Platinum or Palladium toners should be great too, but are too costly to experiment (much) with.

With the B&S gold toner kit, I get a pretty "cold" print after around ten minutes in the toner. The paper itself does seem to warm up as it ages. I don't refrigerate it but that might not be a bad idea if keeping it for a while.

Protect your negative with Mylar. I ruined one neg. It's painful...

Another vote for Clerc's!

Guillaume Zuili said:

Protect your negative with Mylar. I ruined one neg. It's painful...

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Is there any visable loss in print sharpness with a sheet of mylar between the POP and the negative? How thin a sheet if mylar can you get?

I don't know Michael. I have been so upset by that lost neg that I didn't print yet with POP. Mourning I guess...

Selenium -1-30 or 1-50 gives a milk chocolate tone. 2-3 minutes in the toner. But, you need to fix it before toning in selenium.

Here is my process.
Expose the print until it is way over exposed. I'm talking really cooked.

Double fix in sodium thyosulphate where it will bleach a lot, this is why you cook the hell out of it.

Put it in the selenium with constant agitation. I have gotten funny lines if I just let it sit.

Really easy, but a bit unpredictable. The brown and white images in my gallery were done this way.

Never had an issue with ruining a negative.

If you are printing outdoors using the sun, I'd recommend using the mylar. There can be a lot of heat buildup inside the frame and you can get some of the neg sticking to the paper when things go wrong. Also, the humidity might have an effect on the bonding between paper and neg. From experience, I've learned to use mylar if I care about the negative.

Cheers, Richard

rrankin said:

If you are printing outdoors using the sun, I'd recommend using the mylar. There can be a lot of heat buildup inside the frame and you can get some of the neg sticking to the paper when things go wrong. Also, the humidity might have an effect on the bonding between paper and neg. From experience, I've learned to use mylar if I care about the negative.

Cheers, Richard

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Where does a person get mylar of a suitable size and thickness?

Chazzy said:

Where does a person get mylar of a suitable size and thickness?

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Art supply stores, for overlays. I bought a pack some 10 years ago and am still less than half way through it, despite using some sheets for other things. There is no detectable loss of sharpness.

not much experience toning with gold, but I've done a fair amount in a platinum toner. it works in an acid environment, so mix it with citric acid or hydrochloric... etc. I believed Stieglitz used it with nitric.

It's incredibly easy to get the paper's color to shift toward neutral without loosing d-max in platinum (which I found happening when pushing for cooler tones in gold). Once you get it toward neutral, further toning will bring in the colder colors... then, some more toning will give you warm highlights and upper midtones; extended time in platinum does that, why.. I don't know.

Contrary to things I've read here, platinum was about $5 cheaper than gold per gram a couple months ago when I last bought it. I went through artcraft chemicals.

You can also get green colors when using an aged thiosufite fixing bath. Just plain thiosufite used to the point where it becomes cloudy. (Of course I wouldn't trust that fixer to make the print permanent, so I follow it with two fresh baths.) I won't turn green immediately, so leave it in there for a while. Before it gets green it moves through a yellowish hue, so pull it whenever you're happy. Print heavy, all this fixing bleaches.

I was trying a whole shitload of papers after azo was discontinued and ended up here with POP. It's very finnicky and never 100% repeatable (in my darkroom) but when it works, which is quite often, there's really no comparison between this and azo. I wish I had been using it since I began photographing. This is to azo, what azo was to VC papers (of course you need to have the right negative to find that out. Many of my negs geared toward azo 2 print better on POP).

A good place to start is 15ml of a .2% solution potassiumchloroplatinate mixed with 3 grams citric acid in 500ml of water. Add another 5ml of the platinum solution per print.

Remember print heavy, at least until you start to see bronzing in the shadows. When you prerinse the paper before the toner, don't leave it in the water for too long, just until you see the silver has stopped leaking out. Too long can give you a weak print.

Hope this helps. any questions feel free to call 267.772.0827

Also, I never use mylar or anything else between the emulsions. I once printed a negative upside down, (base side of the neg toward emulsion of the paper) and saw a huge difference in sharpness; don't know anything about the mylar. I live in humid south jersey, and have never ruined any negatives, even on days in the 90's. Not saying it'll never happen, but it hasn't yet.

joefreeman said:

Also, I never use mylar or anything else between the emulsions. I once printed a negative upside down, (base side of the neg toward emulsion of the paper) and saw a huge difference in sharpness; don't know anything about the mylar. I live in humid south jersey, and have never ruined any negatives, even on days in the 90's. Not saying it'll never happen, but it hasn't yet.

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Not having seen your POP prints Joe, can you attain the typical blacks and white that Azo can produce consistently or is the coloration dark purple? The ability to get POP in 11x4 and larger sizes could get me going in this direction. What are you using as a UV light souce? A contact printing frame with springs or a vacuum frame?

Cheers!

Thanks all. That's quite an endorsement, Joe. Do you have a link to some of your POP prints? I'm also curious about your light source, specifically, have you used a metal halide or mercury vapor bulb?

Not having seen your POP prints Joe, can you attain the typical blacks and white that Azo can produce consistently or is the coloration dark purple? The ability to get POP in 11x4 and larger sizes could get me going in this direction. What are you using as a UV light souce? A contact printing frame with springs or a vacuum frame?

Do you have a link to some of your POP prints? I'm also curious about your light source, specifically, have you used a metal halide or mercury vapor bulb?

The colors I do get consitently that match my azo prints are on the greenish side of azo's spectrum, the hue I usually aim for. Again, this is because of the first fixing bath. I mix 240 grams of sodium thiosufite to a liter as a sort of stock solution. For the working solution I'll use 300ml of that to 200ml of water. As it starts to age the colors become more and more vibrant.
After just looking at prints I made last night, there isn't a hint of purple in them. When going into that first fixing bath they had a very dark purple, but after 4 minutes it's gone.
In my post yesterday I said that it'll move through yellow first; I said that backwards. In my experience this how it happens: After a couple seconds in the weak fixer you'll see the typical pop color intensify, then after a couple minutes it'll start to vanish in the lighter tones (and eventually in the darker tones), then green will move into the lighter tones. If you keep going the green will move into the lower tones and you'll start to get yellow in the lighter tones. I can't stress enough that you've go to print heavy.

If I were to put one of my azo prints next to one of my pop prints, color-wise, I doubt one could tell the difference.. d-max, and the depth of the shadows (just glow overall) is another story. Pop's tones, especially the lower ones, are much richer than my azo's tones.

It's also possible to get platinum/palladium print looking colors with expired pop, but I'm not about to go off on that tangent.

I'm using homemade spring back frames. On my 8x10 negatives the prints are just as sharp as prints I've made using a vacume frame (actually sharper, since I develop my film semi-stand now).

As a light source I'm using the sun and blb tubes for less contrast, and open sky or cloudy days or printing in the shade for more contrast. I've never used metal halide or mercury bulbs.

I don't have any prints online that you could look at, but I'll send the two of you some if you give me your mailing address. I'm heading to Italy tonight and won't be back for two weeks, but I'll get them in the mail soon as I return.

There is a draw back to using this paper... no burning/dodging (of course there can be if you have the patience). I look at this as a blessing though, seeing I want to spend as little time in the darkroom as possible.

Michael, I hope you do start going in this direction. I'd love to keep this paper around as long as possible. Can't promise you'll have success right away, I didn't, but I'll give you as many pointers as it takes to get you there. I can promise that you'll have a number of unexpected pleasant suprises though.

Michael Kadillak said:

Not having seen your POP prints Joe

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I've seen them. They're unbelievable. I've held his up alongside a Linda Connor print. In comparison hers was pure mud.

Joe has taken POP to a new level. Truly.

Joe, I gotta see one of these. Seriously. I love POP but have not seen the depth you mention.

Mark, I've seen his prints, and they are gorgeous. His combination of semi stand development, POP, and platinum toning is what sets his prints apart of from all the other POP prints out there. Though, what his prints do lack is a smooth transition of tone-- something I think is the problem with semi-stand development-- but that is something that is completely subjective.

Richard Boutwell said:

Though, what his prints do lack is a smooth transition of tone-- something I think is the problem with semi-stand development-- but that is something that is completely subjective.

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It's also an aesthetic choice on Joe's part. I've never known him to show us anything that isn't exactly the way he wants it.

Maybe you've seen others that I haven't seen, but the ones he brought to Louisville seemed smooth enough to me.

I intend to start working with POP soon using TMY negatives developed in Harvey's. That combination is at the other end of the smoothness spectrum from the Tri-X / Pyrocat semi-stand methodology.

The bottom line is that I wouldn't have considered using it again without having seen Joe's prints. And I used to use POP a lot before I discovered Azo.