Sepia then Selenium toning Strangeness

[brian steinberger]

Tonight I printed a negative on Kentmere VC Select. I toned the print in sepia, bleaching all but the blacks and toning in a liter of thiocarbamide toner mixed from scratch with 5.5 grams of accelerator (sodium hydroxide). Anyway, I then washed for 5 minutes, hypo-clear for 5 minutes, then threw it in KRST diluted 1+9, and the color just went crazy! The tones from the sepia toning were nice, but in the selenium the saturation jumped, it was awesome. Previous times I've dual toned, I toned in selenium first to preserve blacks, then bleached and toned in thiocarbamide.

Anyone know what happened here? The only think I can think of is that all the bleached areas weren't re-developed by the sepia toner, but I re-develop in the sepia toner for 1 minute. I've always done it that way and never had a problem.

Anyone else ever experienced this?

 

[Marco B]

I do know that toning times can very greatly between different papers. For example Ilford Multigrade FB (MGIV) is extremely slow with bleaching and toning, may well take 15 minutes for full bleaching and toning. It is actually the slowest toning paper of the few papers I have used up to now. Contrary to that, Ilford Multigrade FB Warmtone (MGFB) is very fast, similar to for example Kentmere VC Fineprint or VC Select... or the now defunct but lovely AGFA MCC 111 FB.

 

[Rich Ullsmith]

If your color went crazy towards reddish-brown, I would guess as you did that maybe they were not completely redeveloped in the sepia. But a minute in the toner seems sufficient . . .usually your accelerator is mixed 100g/l, so that means you would have added 55ml of accelerator. Maybe go back to your formulary?

 

[Brook Hill]

I have found that even with a light bleach with thio. followed by selenium the sepia colour becomes more intense so with a full bleach I guess it would be more extreme. Tim Rudman in his book explains how different bleaches will give significantly different colour shift with selenium.
Try a light bleach and see what happens.

 

[brian steinberger]

Thanks guys.. I used a standard bleach, potassium ferricyanide and potassium bromide. Rick, I mixed my first batch of toner with 70g/l of accelerator and the color was too purplish brown. So I mixed another batch and only added 5.5g/l. This color was nicer, but toning did seem slow. I guess I should have tried and tone for atleast another minute or so, but I've never experienced that before and never thought that the paper might need to tone longer. The color seemed weak too coming out of the sepia toner too.

I've never messed around with bleaching and then selenium toning. Pretty neat! I like the results I got anyhow.