Toning Sepia and Selenium

MJLangdon · Oct 27, 2016

I'm fairly new to toning prints and just need some info to fill in the gaps.

Will Sepia toner only tone areas that have been bleached?
And Selenium toner will only effect areas that have not been affected by the Sepia toner?

I have got all the dilutions, temperatures and times sorted, but because I only slightly tone the print it's hard to see whats actually happening.

Cheers,

Mike.

Ian Grant · Oct 27, 2016

Depends on the toner some are direct and need no bleach, others indirect need a rehalpgenating bleach.

Selenium toning is normal done with an untoned print.

Ian

Bob Carnie · Oct 27, 2016

Mike

I sepia tone first, very rarely to completion so I adjust my bleaching times to correspond to how deep I want the sepia to come into effect.

I will also selenium tone over top of a sepia print, In my case I use a 1 :5 selenium dilution that is quite strong, and I will tone for lets say 45seconds, then pull the print and wash.

This allows the selenium to show itself on the low end, and if I kept the print in the selenium toner for lets say 3minutes well the whole print would go an ugly eggplant magenta purple which I dislike.

pentaxuser · Oct 27, 2016

MJLangdon said:
I have got all the dilutions, temperatures and times sorted, but because I only slightly tone the print it's hard to see whats actually happening.

Cheers,

Mike.

This may not need saying but with slight toning it is worth keeping an untoned print by the toning tray so you can spot the changes more easily and again it may seem obvious but try to tone in roughly the same light level that the toned print will be viewed in

pentaxuser

Patrick Robert James · Oct 27, 2016

A- Yes. But the effect extends more than you think since the bleach affects all silver, not just the silver in the highlights. If you are trying to just do the highlights then you need to be careful and use a diluted bleach. Also, Sulphide can act as a direct toner and eventually tone all silver, but that process takes hours so it is not something you should worry about. You can use this to your benefit though by "Sulphiding" the print in the B bath before you bleach it. If you are using a Thiocarbamide toner, then ignore this.

B- There is a bit of overlap since you are only toning some of the silver with the Sepia toner. Selenium after Sepia will tend to cool the tone of the Sepia. I use the Selenium in a really strong dilution like Bob above. Life is too short to spend standing around.

If you tell us what kind of toners and paper you are using, you can get more specific recommendations.

MJLangdon · Oct 27, 2016

Part A I'm mixing 3.2g of potassium bromide and 3.2g potassium ferricyanide with 1 litre of water for the bleach for between 10-13 seconds.
Part B Im mixing 3.2g of sodium sulphide with 1 litre of water for the Sepia toner for minimum 30 seconds.

I use kodak Selenium 1:6 for 45 seconds.

The paper I use is Ilford multigrade warm tone FB gloss.

brian steinberger · Oct 28, 2016

I would dilute the bleach more. 10-13 seconds is way too short to control. I use 1g of each per liter and bleach for 45 sec to 1:30 depending on image.

I use a thio sepia toner so I can't help you with your toner. I too normally sepia first, short wash, hypo-clear, then selenium.

MJLangdon · Oct 28, 2016

brian steinberger said:
I would dilute the bleach more. 10-13 seconds is way too short to control. I use 1g of each per liter and bleach for 45 sec to 1:30 depending on image.

I use a thio sepia toner so I can't help you with your toner. I too normally sepia first, short wash, hypo-clear, then selenium.

Thanks for the info Brian. I have been using hypo clearing solution after the Selenium toning and final fix.
What is the benefit of hypo before Selenium toning? and is it necessary to do a second fix after all bleaching and toning is complete?

Cheers,
Mike.

brian steinberger · Oct 28, 2016

Mike, hypo-clear is only needed before selenium if you tone in sepia (or another toner) before selenium. If you're just selenium toning you can selenium tone right out of the fixer, with a very brief wash (though this is not necessary if you're fixer is fresh). If you get staining in selenium after fixing than your fixer is bad or fixing was incomplete.

After sepia toning you need to completely wash the print before selenium toning or you risk staining. This washing can either be done with a complete wash or easier, using a hypo-clearing agent. My routine for sepia/selenium is sepia tone, wash for 5 minutes, hypo clear, brief wash or holding bath, selenium tone, brief wash, hypo-clear, final wash.

Fixing after toning has no benefit on any silver that has been converted from toning. Get all your fixing done before toning!

MJLangdon · Oct 29, 2016

brian steinberger said:
Mike, hypo-clear is only needed before selenium if you tone in sepia (or another toner) before selenium. If you're just selenium toning you can selenium tone right out of the fixer, with a very brief wash (though this is not necessary if you're fixer is fresh). If you get staining in selenium after fixing than your fixer is bad or fixing was incomplete.

After sepia toning you need to completely wash the print before selenium toning or you risk staining. This washing can either be done with a complete wash or easier, using a hypo-clearing agent. My routine for sepia/selenium is sepia tone, wash for 5 minutes, hypo clear, brief wash or holding bath, selenium tone, brief wash, hypo-clear, final wash.

Fixing after toning has no benefit on any silver that has been converted from toning. Get all your fixing done before toning!

Thank you for all your help Brian.
I think that I have got all the information I need to fine tune my prints to get the look that I want.

brian steinberger · Oct 29, 2016

Glad I could help Mike.

RauschenOderKorn · Oct 30, 2016

brian steinberger said:
Fixing after toning has no benefit on any silver that has been converted from toning. Get all your fixing done before toning!

I agree on the first part of this statement, the silver which has been toned will not benefit from refixing. At its best, it will remain the same, but a color shift might occur due to fixing after toning. And without a doubt, the prints should be fixed properly prior to toning - but that does not mean that no fixing might be required after toning.

If you tone indirectly (i.e. bleach and redevelop like indirect sepia toning), there are times you do not take the redevelopment (=toning part) to completion. That will leave you undeveloped silver halides in the paper which will affect & darken the print in the longer run. So if you are not sure you have redeveloped to completion (or have not done so on purpose) you should wash and refix the print after the toning stage. This might affect the color achieved during toning depending on the paper and the fixer used. In my personal experience plain hypo will affect the color a lot less than fixers like Ilford rapid / Adofix.

brian steinberger · Oct 30, 2016

RauschenOderKorn said:
I agree on the first part of this statement, the silver which has been toned will not benefit from refixing. At its best, it will remain the same, but a color shift might occur due to fixing after toning. And without a doubt, the prints should be fixed properly prior to toning - but that does not mean that no fixing might be required after toning.

If you tone indirectly (i.e. bleach and redevelop like indirect sepia toning), there are times you do not take the redevelopment (=toning part) to completion. That will leave you undeveloped silver halides in the paper which will affect & darken the print in the longer run. So if you are not sure you have redeveloped to completion (or have not done so on purpose) you should wash and refix the print after the toning stage. This might affect the color achieved during toning depending on the paper and the fixer used. In my personal experience plain hypo will affect the color a lot less than fixers like Ilford rapid / Adofix.

Yes this is true and I wasn't thinking of situations like that. I was assuming he was re-developing to completion any areas that had been bleached. I have had rare occasions where when I bleached a print intending to redevelop in sepia toner and after bleaching I actually preferred the look of the bleached print. And in a case like this you would obviously need to re-fix the print.

RauschenOderKorn · Oct 30, 2016

I use this technique with prints which have become overexposed for some reason (carelessness, bracketing, etc.) . Bleaching and some redevelopment at sight in dilute sepia toner.

nworth · Nov 2, 2016

There are lots of sepia and selenium toners, and they are all a bit different. The most common bleach-redevelop sepia toners use a ferricyanide bleach and redevelop the image in sodium sulfide. Sodium sulfide will have some toning effect on an unbleached image, but not a great deal. The usual selenium toners are the KRST type, direct toners that act on an unbleached image. Dual toning with both these toners is possible, the effect varying with the order of use and the degree of bleaching and toning in each.

MJLangdon · Nov 2, 2016

nworth said:
There are lots of sepia and selenium toners, and they are all a bit different. The most common bleach-redevelop sepia toners use a ferricyanide bleach and redevelop the image in sodium sulfide. Sodium sulfide will have some toning effect on an unbleached image, but not a great deal. The usual selenium toners are the KRST type, direct toners that act on an unbleached image. Dual toning with both these toners is possible, the effect varying with the order of use and the degree of bleaching and toning in each.

Thanks for the reply.
I mix my own bleach and sepia toner from raw chemicals and I use kodak Selenium toner 1:6
The raw chemicals are bromide and ferricyanide for the bleach and sulphide for the Sepia toner.

wilfbiffherb · Nov 4, 2016

Hi MJLangdon, looks like you may have got your answer but i'll share too just in case. I do sepia & selenium on one print a lot. if you are using a bleach and redevelop sepia (which is the most common kind) then dilute your bleach to around 1:5 or 1:9 as this will reduce the bleach time and give you more control over when you snatch your print. The sepia will indeed only tone parts of the print that have been bleached so when bleaching try to image how the print will look once sepia toned. Dual toned prints always look good when the bleaching is taken down to the lower mid-tones so look out for when your darker mid tones are just starting to lighten then remove your print from the bleach and wash it. of course you can always pull your print earlier if you only want sepia highlights. Once thoroughly washed stick your print in the toner and let the image come back. Bear in mind that you will definitely lose some highlight detail when sepia toning so add a little extra density to your highlights to compensate, around 1/3 stop max should do it. Once sepia toned give the print another wash and then selenium tone. You can actually get a lot of colour variation with selenium toner. Selenium toner works from the shadows up to the highlights, the opposite of the sepia kit, which is why they work so well together. A strong dilution, around 1:3 or 1:5 will give a strong colour shift (especially on warmtone papers where you can get plums and reddish browns) whereas weaker dilutions like 1:20 or so will increase your shadow density making your print "pop" but won't really shift the colour. Now it is up to you, you can selenium tone all the way up to where your sepia comes in or you can pull the print early and preserve the papers midtone colour creating a tri-tone print.

I hope that has been helpful, just drop me a pm if you have any more questions.

Rich Ullsmith · Nov 5, 2016

Pretty much against the MO but I use a very strong bleach, always. I mean 15 to 30 seconds for a partial bleach for fiber. If you don't allow enough time for the bleach to soak into the print, it will stop quickly in cold bath. You can really refine the time with a test strip.

Weak bleach, for a partial bleach you sit there and let it soak in. Then you go, aha! there it is. And it keeps bleaching in the rinse for a bit.

Plus, I have more confidence with a shorter wash that the bleach is out. Let it sit in dilute bleach for five minutes, I am not sure.

Anyways, works for me and saves lots of time. Anything you can do to keep chemistry from working its way into the paper.

Chuck_P · Feb 9, 2025

Rich Ullsmith said:
Pretty much against the MO but I use a very strong bleach, always. I mean 15 to 30 seconds for a partial bleach for fiber. If you don't allow enough time for the bleach to soak into the print, it will stop quickly in cold bath. You can really refine the time with a test strip.

Weak bleach, for a partial bleach you sit there and let it soak in. Then you go, aha! there it is. And it keeps bleaching in the rinse for a bit.

Plus, I have more confidence with a shorter wash that the bleach is out. Let it sit in dilute bleach for five minutes, I am not sure.

Anyways, works for me and saves lots of time. Anything you can do to keep chemistry from working its way into the paper.

I need to awaken this thread and ask.................does the phrase "very strong bleach" just mean no dilution at all of the bleach bath or is something done differently to make it stronger than the bleach bath would be otherwise?

I tone all my prints in selenium, either 1+10 or 1+19 depending on the image, but I want to try split toning with sepia. My recent order of materials included Photo Formulary's Sepia Toner 221 and I'm interested in the idea of shorter wash time in this process. Primarily because I'm also shifting back to fiber-based paper, and I ordered Ilford's MGFB Classic but I don't yet have a vertical print washer, but I see one in my not-too-distant future. Before with my short usage of FB paper (early 2000s) I used my bathtub a lot and was able to achieve a good washed print from a residual fixer perspective (it was just a PIA to do), but I never really tested for residual silver, however those few prints seem to be holding their own since that time.

koraks · Feb 9, 2025

Chuck_P said:
I'm interested in the idea of shorter wash time in this process

Note that the argument put forth earlier by @Rich Ullsmith seems to be based on how effectively you can get rid of the bleach in particular from the fiber-based paper, before going to the subsequent toning step. I think the reasoning is that with a rapidly bleach bath that gets the job done in <30 seconds, the bleach doesn't have much time to permeate through the paper base and thus won't take as long to rinse out before you go to the actual sepia toner. However, in my personal experience and opinion, it doesn't really matter much. 15-30 seconds will be enough to allow the bleach to get pretty much everywhere in the paper anyway. And rinsing it out is a matter of a couple of minutes and 2-3 changes of water. In terms of wash times, with 'wash' referring to the final wash before the print is dried and finished, it doesn't matter either way since the speed of bleaching won't affect the effectiveness of the final wash.

As to dilution of the bleach: that's such a vague area that terms like 'undiluted' are virtually meaningless. There's no standard concentration of bleach stock as you buy it. There can easily be factors of 2 or 4 or even more between bleach 'concentrates' from different manufacturers. You dilute bleach and then test to see how it goes, and maybe take note of your bleach times on a particular material for a particular dilution - but even that is a moving target as the bleach slows down as it's being used. It can be regenerated by adding some potassium bromide, which will make it zippy fast again. In practice, you determine bleach times entirely experimentally and bleach by eye. Trying to somehow standardize things is pretty much impossible unless you're printing a batch of identical prints and use the bleach one shot (=unnecessarily wasteful).

Chuck_P · Feb 9, 2025

koraks said:
However, in my personal experience and opinion, it doesn't really matter much. 15-30 seconds will be enough to allow the bleach to get pretty much everywhere in the paper anyway.

koraks said:
You dilute bleach and then test to see how it goes, and maybe take note of your bleach times on a particular material for a particular dilution - but even that is a moving target as the bleach slows down as it's being used.

The first comment helps to confirm the thought I had in my mind, but without any experience with sepia toning to be confident on it at all. As to the second comment, I'm a firm believer in testing materials..........but no moving targets! Thanks.

Carnie Bob · Feb 9, 2025

MJLangdon said:
Part A I'm mixing 3.2g of potassium bromide and 3.2g potassium ferricyanide with 1 litre of water for the bleach for between 10-13 seconds.
Part B Im mixing 3.2g of sodium sulphide with 1 litre of water for the Sepia toner for minimum 30 seconds.

I use kodak Selenium 1:6 for 45 seconds.

The paper I use is Ilford multigrade warm tone FB gloss.

This sounds exactly like my dilutions but I use 10 litres at a time.

Chuck_P · Mar 4, 2025

Carnie Bob said:
This sounds exactly like my dilutions but I use 10 litres at a time.

I can see that I will most likely get the ingredients to mix my own sepia in the future.

A couple of questions:

As for what I ordered from Photographer's Formulary, it included 20g of sodium carbonate mono for the bleach bath............what does that ingredient lend to the bleach process? Is there a reason why it is being left out in your mix?

Also, PF is recommending with it's "Sepia Sulfide Toner 221" to fix in a hardening toner after toning because the sulfide bath softens the prints emulsion too much. Would this be a necessary step if the print was just sepia toned and not going to be split-toned with selenium? I understand the protective nature of the selenium toning bath against deterioration from UV, etc....but is it also providing a hardening effect?

Toning Sepia and Selenium

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