The challenge with Salt Printing

Hello,
I’m planning to start salt printing and would like to know if you have a formula for Gold Toner. I was searching for a pre-mixed Gold Toner but couldn’t find it in Japan, so I’m interested in learning how to make it by mixing Gold Chloride (1g), Borax, distilled water, etc.

Also, is it possible to use a UV light for this? The size of the negative is 5x7, and I expect the print size to be around 8x10 inches.
I’m thinking of placing the light about 30 cm above the negative using a tripod or something similar. Would this result in exposure times that are too long?

Thank you in advance!!!

D_Quinn said:

formula for Gold Toner

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This is what I use:

Final volume:	1000​	ml
Gold chloride 1%	50​	ml
Thiourea 1%	50​	ml
Tartaric acid	0.5​	g
Sodium chloride	20​	g

I generally make a somewhat more concentrated solution of the thiourea, tartaric acid and sodium chloride. Then, immediately before use, I add water to this and the required amount of gold chloride solution. I do this to ensure my gold chloride solution stays unaffected until it's time to use it.
I use this mostly with salt prints. I get the best results when I tone after fixing. When using this before fixing, there tends to be a small amount of staining, which can be entirely prevented if toning is done after fixing.

For a very brief time, I tried my hand at YouTube videos; I ended up making only a handful, but one happens to be about salt prints:

D_Quinn said:

Also, is it possible to use a UV light for this?

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The light you link to will likely work, but the big question is what its actual power rating is. It says 60W on the faceplate, but my experience with these LED units is that the power rating is often overstated by a huge margin. I wouldn't be surprised if the "60W" unit ends up being only around 15W RMS. This would result in very, very long exposure times.
Get the most powerful unit you can afford. LED is fine; the ones rated at "300W" (which in reality is closer to 75W RMS or so) are fairly affordable. You can gang up a couple in an array to boost power; I'm using 4 units in a rectangular setup. For salt prints, a wavelength of 395nm is fine and turns out to give good performance at low cost. Here's what I used not so long ago: https://tinker.koraks.nl/photography/beam-me-down-scotty-a-new-ultra-simple-uv-light-source/
I've since switched to similar lights which combine 395nm and 365nm LEDs because I'm doing a lot of DAS carbon transfer and DAS specifically requires 365nm. Salted paper/silver chloride works just fine with the cheaper and more efficient 395nm LEDs, though.

D_Quinn said:

The size of the negative is 5x7, and I expect the print size to be around 8x10 inches.

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Contact print, right? Paper size doesn't really matter. When using LED floodlights, I like to make the light source roughly the same size as the negative. This allows to keep the distance between the print and the light source small, which makes * a lot * of difference in printing times. The 30cm you're planning for is just fine with floodlights.

The main problem I see with salt prints is that people are trying to print from negatives with too short a tonal scale. As a result, they keep exposures short because otherwise their highlights get too dark. But this comes at the cost of very low dmax, resulting in lifeless prints. When you get your light source, do some tests to see how much exposure you need to get a convincing black (on the entirely processed, dried print; you'll see quite dramatic density changes during wet processing; ignore this, what matters is how it comes out in the end once it's dry). Then make your negatives so that you can use this exposure time. Trying to use too thin negatives results in disappointment.

I use the Gold/thiocyanate toner for Salt and Kallitype prints. It's the same recipe as what B&S sells:

A: 500ml Ammonium Thiocyanate solution 2%
B: 500ml Gold Chloride solution 0.2%

I buy the chemicals from ArtCraft and make the stock solution myself. To make a working solution, you add 5ml of EACH Part A and Part B per 100ml of working solution. (For toning an 8X10 image on 11X14 paper, 100 ml of working solution is sufficient, but you must use a flat bottomed tray to make that small volume work.)

For printing in the summer, I work with sunlight (shade, facing open north sky), but in the winter I use a bank of LED lights, so what you have in mind should work just fine. You will have to experiment with distance and exposure times to determine what is correct for your equipment. Do test strips to start with.

VERY IMPORTANT: as Koraks has said, you need to engineer your negatives to have extra contrast and high value density to work for Salted Paper printmaking. I highly recommend that you read Ellie Young's paper on Salted Paper printmaking, as it specifically - and in great detail - addresses the proper technique for making an in-camera negative with the right density and contrast for the process.

retina_restoration said:

I highly recommend that you read Ellie Young's paper on Salted Paper printmaking

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Certainly; it remains an excellent resource, also for other aspects of the process. It's an absolute must-read.

Some gold toner formulae:


Don't worry about the references to POP and albumen. They will work just fine with salt.

Thanks everyone for all the useful information and the video! This is great! The online book looks super informative. I'll take some time to figure it out this weekend. For now, just a quick thank you!

This time I am planning to make a simple Gold Borax toner for toning salt prints.

I obtained 1 gram of powdered Gold Chloride here (picture) in Tokyo, and I intend to dissolve it in 100 ml of water to create a Gold Chloride stock solution.
Would it be appropriate to store this solution in the refrigerator, and should I use a dark bottle for storage?


For toning, I plan to prepare only the amount needed each time.
I’m following Ellie Young's formula for Gold Borax toner, which specifies:

• Distilled water: 1000 ml
• Sodium tetraborate (borax): 6 gm
• Gold chloride 1% solution: 12 ml

Since I only need about 100 ml of toner at a time, I plan to use the following proportions:

• Distilled water: 100 ml
• Sodium tetraborate (borax): 0.6 gm
• Gold chloride 1% solution: 6 ml

The prints I am toning are slightly larger than 5x7 inches, and I use a tray that fits them snugly.
How many 5x7 inch prints would I likely be able to tone with this 100 ml of toner? Is there any indication that the toner gets exhausted?

Thank you!

D_Quinn said:

Would it be appropriate to store this solution in the refrigerator, and should I use a dark bottle for storage?

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Fridge or brown bottle aren't necessary, but won't hurt either.

D_Quinn said:

Gold chloride 1% solution: 6 ml

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1.2ml, not 6ml.

D_Quinn said:

How many 5x7 inch prints would I likely be able to tone with this 100 ml of toner?

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2 to 3 I'd say. Depends a bit on overall density

koraks said:

Fridge or brown bottle aren't necessary, but won't hurt either.



1.2ml, not 6ml.




2 to 3 I'd say. Depends a bit on overall density

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Thanks for the comments.
You are right. I was just about to waste this precious (expensive) gold by accident, whew

Also, I believe you tone the prints after fixing, but is it okay to tone them once they’ve fully dried? For example, could I let them dry completely and tone two or three prints together the next day?

Another question: if the toning solution starts to lose effectiveness, is there any indication? Would it simply take longer for the color to change, for instance?

Yes, you could dry your prints and then decide afterwards if you want to tone them. That's not a problem at all.

Once the toner wears out, it becomes very very slow. You can then replenish it by adding a little more gold chloride solution, or simply replace the toner and use some fresh solution.

koraks said:

Yes, you could dry your prints and then decide afterwards if you want to tone them. That's not a problem at all.

Once the toner wears out, it becomes very very slow. You can then replenish it by adding a little more gold chloride solution, or simply replace the toner and use some fresh solution.

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Thank you so much!!

Nowadays I coat and expose one sheet at a time and if the print is looking good after the developer stage, I'll leave it face down in the wash water while I prepare the toner for that one print - 40mL for an 8x10 print in a flat bottom Cresco tray is sufficient. I tone before fixing. That way the toner is always fresh and the waste is zero.

Tom Taylor said:

Nowadays I coat and expose one sheet at a time and if the print is looking good after the developer stage, I'll leave it face down in the wash water while I prepare the toner for that one print - 40mL for an 8x10 print in a flat bottom Cresco tray is sufficient. I tone before fixing. That way the toner is always fresh and the waste is zero.

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I do something similar, although I usually make a small number of prints (4-6) in a session. I usually make up 100 mL of toner in a flat bottom tray. If the toner gets a bit slow towards the end of a session, I replenish, as @koraks suggests, with 0.5 mL of gold solution.

I also tone before fixing and give the print a brief wash in 0.2% sodium carbonate before fixing in a carbonate containing fixer. All of this is as recommended in Chris Anderson's book and is based on her extensive research.

I find that predicting the capacity of gold toner is difficult as it depends on the amount of silver in each print... prints with a lot of dark shadows use more gold than prints with lots of highlights.

Hope it's not too late for one last question. I have been toning after drying since I never know until the prints are dry whether they look good enough to tone. (I don't want to waste gold toner on second-rate prints). I read somewhere that if you tone after drying you should refix the print. I believe the idea was that toning releases additional silver so you need the second fix to clear that silver. Is this true? Is a second fix necessary?

pfrand said:

Hope it's not too late for one last question. I have been toning after drying since I never know until the prints are dry whether they look good enough to tone. (I don't want to waste gold toner on second-rate prints). I read somewhere that if you tone after drying you should refix the print. I believe the idea was that toning releases additional silver so you need the second fix to clear that silver. Is this true? Is a second fix necessary?

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I have no experience toning after fixing, but here is a quote from Christina Anderson's book (https://www.routledge.com/Salted-Pa...mporary-Artists/Anderson/p/book/9781138280229), p78:

"Note: gold and platinum toning comes before fixing, because toning produces silver chloride which needs to be fixed out; more important, it avoids sulfiding the print and making more prone to fading. Selenium, copper and iron blue toning come after fixing and can be used on a previously completed and dried print."

She provides two references for the first statement in this quote one to Reilly's book on albumen and salted-paper printing and a second to Ware's book on gold in photography.

I always gold tone after fixing, and never fix again after gold toning.

Hmm. This pretty much corresponds to what I have heard: some say you need to fix again, some say you don't. Moersch told me there is no need to refix after toning with his
selenium toner, but that may be an entirely different chemical reaction. I suppose I will continue to refix after toning just to be safe. Thank you both for the info!

pfrand said:

Hmm. This pretty much corresponds to what I have heard: some say you need to fix again, some say you don't. Moersch told me there is no need to refix after toning with his
selenium toner, but that may be an entirely different chemical reaction. I suppose I will continue to refix after toning just to be safe. Thank you both for the info!

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Avoid using Selenium to tone a salt print - the color you're likely to get will be harsh and ugly.
You'd be wise to learn to evaluate your prints prior to fixing, and choose which ones to tone before fixing. Toning prior to fixing is by far the better option - you won't be dealing with unwanted byproducts which can be very difficult to wash out of the print.

Thanks for the advice. I will try toning before fixing in the future.

pfrand said:

Thanks for the advice. I will try toning before fixing in the future.

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It's worth keeping in mind that to tone an 8x10 print, you can use as little as 100ml of gold toner (as long as you're using a flat bottom tray), which costs very little. I make up my own Gold/Thiocyanate toner from its components, and that reduces the per-print cost quite a bit also. I'd recommend worrying less about the cost of toning and emphasize the pursuit of the ideal finished print as paramount.

Here are my questions regarding these two salt prints. I would appreciate advice from experienced individuals.
One print is gold-toned, while the other is not, and they were processed on different days.


Other than that, the general conditions are the same, but the gold-toned print has been processed relatively properly.
Note: Both are test prints, so the fixing and final washing times were short.

Both prints were made using the same digital negative.
Note: In the highlight areas, the printer's performance (ink) is insufficient to fully block UV, resulting in slightly weaker exposure times.


Chemicals used:

• Salting solution: 1.6% NaCl
• Silver nitrate solution: 11%

Exposure light and time:

• UV black light for 9 minutes

The fixing solution was freshly prepared just before use for both prints.

Questions:

1. The gold-toned print appears to have a noticeably lower Dmax.
   • Could this be due to fog? Is it because I didn’t use citric acid? Or was it because I did gold toning before the fix??
2. There is a stain in the green-bordered area of the gold-toned print.
   • Do you know what could have caused this?

As always, thank you for your help!

D_Quinn said:

Here are my questions regarding these two salt prints. I would appreciate advice from experienced individuals.
One print is gold-toned, while the other is not, and they were processed on different days.

Questions:

1. The gold-toned print appears to have a noticeably lower Dmax.
   • Could this be due to fog? Is it because I didn’t use citric acid? Or was it because I did gold toning before the fix??
2. There is a stain in the green-bordered area of the gold-toned print.
   • Do you know what could have caused this?

As always, thank you for your help!

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The difference in Dmax could be entirely due to different atmospheric conditions, since you did the prints on different days. So many seemingly insignificant factors play a role in how the final print looks, and it can be difficult to determine which factor influenced that day's print.
Always gold tone the print BEFORE fixing. Always.
Stains are typically the result of contamination at some step in the process. All it takes is a bit of carryover from one step to the next to result in marks on the print. I found Salt to be a fussy process in this regard, and I have largely switched to Kallitype because of it. I find it much easier to get an excellent print from Kallitype than Salt. I Gold tone both and have printed the same negative using both processes, and I cannot tell them apart (except by referring to the notes on the back), they are so similar.

Regarding digital negatives: I have Canon printers and they do NOT deliver sufficient density to make a suitable negative for Salt printing. Maybe this is what you're using as well. My remedy for this problem was to print two identical negatives of somewhat reduced intensity and carefully sandwich them together as one negative. Then, I got far better contrast, highlights and Dmax than I ever did with a single digital negative.
However, I soon gave that up and went to making in-camera negatives on FP4, which give far better results (for my taste).

D_Quinn said:

Both prints were made using the same digital negative.
Note: In the highlight areas, the printer's performance (ink) is insufficient to fully block UV, resulting in slightly weaker exposure times.

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I think that this is most of your problem. Your Dmax in the untoned print is fairly weak. Thus, I imagine, that you are under exposing to keep the highlights 'right'.

Here, as another 'data point', is a pair of recent prints of mine; both from the same digital negative. The toner was gold/bicarbonate and it was used before fixing.



I'm no expert and I have not measured anything with a densitometer, but I think that part of the perceived difference in density between the two prints is simply the difference in hue. That said, the human visual system is not a good (unbiased) densitometer.

Two other comments...

I would be very careful about making comparisons between prints that were not processed identically. This is the point @retina_restoration is making in the first sentence of their reply. There are too many unknown unknowns in alt process printing which might affect the outcome. Even comparing prints made on different days might lead one astray.

Lastly, I imagine that to get optimized results from gold toning that one would need to make a negative (i.e. tweak the applied curve) specifically for gold-toned prints. Do I do this... nope. Do I think that I could make a somewhat better print by doing this... yup.

D_Quinn said:

Could this be due to fog? Is it because I didn’t use citric acid? Or was it because I did gold toning before the fix??

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Fog is non-image density, so if you're seeing a lack of density, it's certainly not fog.
Citric acid is not necessarily required in processing a salt print; I like to use it because it makes the first wash more effective/faster, but if you use a fairly long wash, it'll still work without citric acid. The duration of the wash can affect overall density if for some reason the image doesn't adhere particularly well to the paper, e.g. due to buffering or sizing agents dissolving from the paper and taking some of the image silver with them. This puts us back into the territory of "which paper works best." Papers perform very differently, as you're well aware.
Toning before fixing can promote fog, but this won't reduce dmax (see first point above).

D_Quinn said:

There is a stain in the green-bordered area of the gold-toned print.

• Do you know what could have caused this?

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It's not clear to me what the stain is that you're referring to. I see some slight density variations that look to be the result of slightly uneven sensitizer coating and perhaps minor local differences in paper surface. I don't see anything in this regard that would worry me.

Overall, your weak prints are due to the lack of proper negatives as pointed out by both @retina_restoration and @fgorga above. The overall approach towards a good salt print, are:
1: Establish which process and materials (esp. paper) will yield a good tonal range, which I view as (1) good maximum density/black, (2) clear whites extending all the way into pure paper white and (3) smooth rendering of the mid-tones without any graininess or coarseness.
2: Ensure that your printing process is consistent; i.e. that you get the exact same outcome for every identically made print. As long as you have variations in how prints come out that are made with the same materials, the process is not under control and it makes little sense to optimize negatives for it as you're shooting at a moving target.
3: Create the negatives required for your prints. Adjust the negatives to the materials and process you've established before. Don't try to fix deficiencies in the negatives by adjusting the process or materials; doing so will nearly invariably result in lackluster prints.

The crux of the problem, the way I see it, is that you're still trying to adjust the process to poor negatives. That's a dead-end street.

Thank you very much for your valuable comments and advice! They are extremely helpful.

I believe the biggest factor behind not achieving sufficient Dmax lies in my inkjet printer's inability to produce negatives that achieve adequate whiteness in the highlight areas (this is separate from the issue of Gold toning). However, since I currently don't have the budget to purchase a high-quality printer, I plan to settle for a reasonable level of quality with my current printer.


From the perspective of Dmax, I’ve determined that my UV exposure unit achieves the deepest possible black at around 12 minutes of exposure—just short of causing bronzing. However, when I print a step chart negative (not a Stouffer T2115 but a chart created in Photoshop ranging from 0% to 100%) with a 12-minute exposure, while the black areas reach Dmax, the white patch (100% grayscale on the negative) does not achieve paper white on the print (the negative is on Pictorico film). As a workaround, I’ve been adjusting the curve to sacrifice some degree of Dmax while ensuring a reasonable level of whiteness in the highlights.


Does this approach make sense?

Furthermore, when I attempted Gold toning on the prints made with this method, expecting the blacks to deepen slightly, the result was that the Dmax actually became shallower compared to the untoned print—quite an unexpected outcome


I hadn’t considered the impact of paper choice. So far, my tests have been done on Canson sketchbook paper, but I also have Hahnemühle Platinum Rag and plan to test it with that paper as well.