How come toned prints lose color as they wash and dry down?

I've wondered this for quite some time now and always just accepted it, but there has to be a reason. This may not be true for every paper out there but for Ilford MGIV and MGWT the effects in the toning bath are so colorful and saturated (almost too much many times) and by the time I view the prints the next morning the color that I remember seeing is no longer there, at least desaturated quite a bit.

Does this happen more in the wash or upon drying? And is there anyway to minimize this from happening in the case I would like to keep a bold color?

BTW... I'm mainly talking about selenium (on MGWT) and sepia toning (mainly on MGIV). Brown toner doesn't seem to lose color as much as the other two.

Brian, you are noticing the dreaded effects of "dry down"

FB papers do it more than RC - but sadly they all do it to some degree.

You should not be loosing colour or tone during the wash - if the prints are properly processed

Sadly, there is no counter-measure - you just have to make adjustments in you print process to compensate for the change

Les McLean has a good article on his Web Site about compensating for Dry Down - http://www.lesmcleanphotography.com/articles.php?page=full&article=28

Good luck

Martin

Martin, thanks for the response. I fully understand dry down. This is a loss of intensity of color. Is that still associated with dry down as well?

In my experience, there shouldn't be a great loss of colour or tone when prints are dry, maybe a little sometimes but not to any great extent. I did once though, notice some loss of colour in some RC prints I toned but put it down to the toner being near exhaustion. FB paper tends to tone better than RC in most cases and ILF WT FB in selenium is very good but I find you need a fairly strong solution and slighty longer in the toning bath compared to other warmtone emulsions like Forte or Foma. I think wet prints always look more 'juicy' when wet and perhaps you need to compensate as Martin says. I think it's really important to do your toning in good daylight aswell and have an untoned print in a tray of water next to the one you're toning for an accurate comparison.

It might be worth taking a dry print which you have previously toned and thought to have lost some colour, then place it in a tray of water to see if the colour re appears ?

I don't see loss of colour, just some drydown that reduces some contrast, but it's easy enough to pop a test strip in the microwave and see how it will dry down.

Losing colour from toning though, that's a new one to me. What is your refixing/washing procedure?

Keith, my fixing regime is atwo bath system. I always make sure the fixer is fresh. I use permawash and wash for two hours in an archival washer. I guess it's just another weird part of photography that I don't understand. I fully toned a MGWT print in the new Ilford Selenium toner the other night. Diluted 1:3 it works very fast. After 10 minutes the print is thoroughly toned and the color is a beautiful reddish brown color, almost looked a little too extreme for the photograph. The next morning when dry, the color wasn't a vibrant, still nice though. I do compensate for dry down when printing. I use a microwave and dry test strips. I have a ton of darkroom photography books and think I recall reading in one of them that you do lose some vibrancy of color as the print dries. So I've always just assumed it to be true, but now I'm wondering why. I guess if no one really knows then it's either a stupid question or it doesn't happen to anyone else!

Brian, I have had the same thing with Ilford FB MGWT & strong Ilford Selenium - the colour when wet was an almost startling red with a touch of brown - I didn't think it would be possible to achieve such a colour.

However, when dry the print is only a sad reflection of the vibrantly striking colour when wet - the red colour seemed to have receded dramatically and was now brown with a hind of red.

Actually, when I first saw the dry prints I thought I wasn’t looking at the right set but after furious hunting, checking my notes and the scribbled messages on the back of the prints I realised these were they

I think Tim Rudman refers to it in passing but does not go into detail.

Dry down strikes again I am afraid – sad isn’t it

Martin

brian steinberger said:

I guess if no one really knows then it's either a stupid question or it doesn't happen to anyone else!

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Actually, it happened to me. I made two identical prints in Ilford FB (the plain one) and I really mean identical. I exposed the same piece of paper, making two exposures (side by side, for the same time) and deved, stopped, fixed. Washed it properly and left to dry for the next day. After cutting the paper to get two identical prints, I placed them in a tray with water. The other tray had KRST 1+12. Placed one of them in the toning bath and agitated for about 5' (IIRC). The toned one got quite purple. Washed it once more and after drying the effect was almost gone!

Martin Aislabie said:

Dry down strikes again I am afraid – sad isn’t it

Martin

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Martin,

Ah, someone else has experienced it! How is the color loss related to dry down?

Anon Ymous said:

The other tray had KRST 1+12. Placed one of them in the toning bath and agitated for about 5' (IIRC). The toned one got quite purple. Washed it once more and after drying the effect was almost gone!

Click to expand...

Yep, happened to you too. Maybe it's a selenium thing. I do notice it the most with selenium toned prints, especially ones that have been toned near or to completion. Though I've also seen it in sepia toned prints as well.

brian steinberger said:

How is the color loss related to dry down?

Click to expand...

I am using the term "Dry Down" to describe any change in colour or tone between a wet and dry print.

What mechanisms are involved in achieving such an effect - sadly, I don't have a clue

I never bothered to find out if I re-wetted the print the vivid red tone would return - I just binned the lot in disappointment

Martin

Well, most of the dry down effect, as I understand it, is due to quite simple optics of reflection. A wet paper (or RC paper) reflects light in a more directional way, meaning that there will always be one direction at which you can view the print and get almost bottomless blacks. The flip side of this is that there will also be angles at which you can view the print and see naught but surface shine. But this isn't usually a problem for most people because they will (subconsciously) adjust their perspective to avoid the shine and see what they want to see. Plus if there is glass over the print (and there usually is) then you would always have a bad-shine direction anyway, so it's moot.

A dry, non-RC, surface with a fiber texture will tend to reflect in all directions quite evenly. The benefit of this is that you can view the print from many directions and see very consistent tones from any viewing angle and under almost any lighting. No special shine direction (except at very extreme angles). Sounds good, right? But the flip side of this is that the blacks cannot possibly be as deep- there is no 'magic' angle at which surface reflection is suppressed.

So there are plusses and minuses. We must proceed with caution on this discussion, as it will almost inevitably turn into FB vs. RC debate Stickign to the point, you need to dry the paper (microwave it) to see where drydown will take you.

As for change in colour on dry down, I can see why there might be changes in the depth of the colour on drydown, but I don't see why the colour itself would shift if the print was fixed properly... unless the toning was incomplete. If the toning is incomplete then maybe some residual oxidative reactions could take place upon drying that may indeed cause a colour shift. To avoid this, I would think that complete fixing after a non-toning treatment in Se may be the best remedy.

An optical illusion, perhaps?

One other culprit is metamerism. But that would be something that would change with viewing angle of course, I don't think you'd perceive it as an overall colour shift.

I guess my money is on incomplete toning

The change in tone upon drying is most pronounced in Ilford MGWT. And even more pronounced the more the print has been played with, i.e. bleaching and redeveloping before toning. Particularly bleaching in copper sulfate, and even more so when redeveloping in lith. There's something different with MGWT emulsion, I have no idea what it is. That would be money, if those copper and monochrome splits would stay when dry.