Tips for better results with iron blue toner

Hi Everyone,

I have started trying to tone some prints with iron blue toner. I am using the Tetenal kit with various papers including Ilford Classic, MGIV and Fomatone.

I'm struggling to get good results. If I pull the print from the wash when the tone looks good then the whites are stained yellow. If I wash long enough to clear the whites then I lose a lot of tone in the upper highlights and get a really ugly split tone. I tried using a weak sodium carbonate bath and that cleared the highlights nicely but also affected the color of the toning and made it go more greenish.

Any suggestions or tips to try?

(If anyone is going to suggest gold toner I do plan on trying that too, but I don't want to mix up a very expensive batch of it just to tone a few prints.)

Regards,
Anthony

Welcome to my 15 year nightmare... Ian says he can chase it away but I have had nothing but terrible luck... this is why I moved to gum... blues are easy in gum , in silver an absolute nightmare.

there is lots of info in the archives here, if you can solve this let me know in May

For cyanotype prints it’s usual to expose past the desired density due to loss of the Prussian blue during washing. I imagine it’s the same situation with iron toner though I haven’t thoroughly tested this.

So you might want to experiment with going past the point that you want with the toner, or perhaps, overexposing the print in the first place.

Do not use a sodium carbonate bath or any kind of alkali really. Prussian blue breaks down in alkaline conditions. For cyanotype lots of people’s first rinse after exposure is in an acidic bath.