Hello everybody!
I'm going to be toning some prints made on Ilford MG IV FB, which are meant to be sold. The toning is done primarily to make the prints as stable as possible.
It is often said that neutral and cold-tone papers don't respond to selenium toning that well. Does that only affect the color shifts, or does it also mean that it results in less protection?
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Don't respond to selenium toning that well" only means color shift! The paper WILL be toned just like a warm tone paper, meaning the silver is converted to silverselenide, it just doesn't display the strong color shift. The reason for the limited color shift is the differing size of the silver particles (smaller for warm tone papers).
However, if you tone for "maximum stability", the only way you will achieve it is if you tone to absolute completion. Unfortunately, how much time this requires and when it is achieved is both highly depended on the specific paper used, and can be very hard to determine with selenium toner due to the limited color shifts on some papers like MG IV.
Since selenium toner acts quite slow, it at least means modest dilutions of the toner (probably 1:10 max), and even than you should do good to check for how much time it really takes for full toning. Since, due to the limited color shift in the cold tone MG IV, it is virtually impossible to judge "by eye" for full toning watching for a complete color shift of both shadows and highlights, the only really reliable way to determine the time needed for full toning, is to do some controlled tests. A proposition for a way to do this:
- Ensure you have an untoned control test strip for reference.
- Tone several strips for e.g. 2,4,8,15 and 30 minute in the selenium toner (make sure to mark them on the back with pencil so you can keep track of them).
- Make a second "control" of the longest toning time (30 minutes) only.
- Now bleach all of them (except the untoned and maximum toned controls) in a ferricyanide bath of a two-bath bleach/redevelop style sepia toner (e.g. ferricyanide/thiourea). You will probaly be highly surprised to discover that some shorter toning times showing a pretty marked color shift in the selenium toner compared to an untoned control (e.g. 4 minutes), in fact turn out to be hardly toned at all, and bleach away to a pretty large extent, meaning all that silver was untoned and thus unprotected!
- Sepia tone them in the redevelop thiourea bath. The subsequent sepia toning will reveal even the smallest amount of bleaching that has taken place (and thus silver untoned by the first selenium toning step), that you may not have noticed in the bleach bath.
What to do next?:
- Have a good look at each them and compare them to the maximum, 30 minutes, control. A shift in color compared to the maximum control, means you have not reached full toning.
- Draw your own conclusions based upon the observations
E.g.:
If the 2,4 and 8 minutes toned strips show a sepia color shift compared to the 30 minutes control, but the 15 minutes doesn't, than full selenium toning was reached in between 8 to 15 minutes toning.
If the 30 minutes selenium and sepia toned print still shows a color shift to sepia compared to the 30 minutes selenium-only test strip, than even after 30 minutes, your prints were NOT fully selenium toned.
Another tip:
- Double tonings of selenium and sepia can be especially beautiful, and by varying the amount of each tone step, you can have a lot of creative freedom. In addition, from an archival point of view and to achieve full toning, it may be more efficient as well, allowing for truely full toning with only modest color shifts (especially on a cold tone paper like MG IV)
Marco