What toner combinations for good split tones?

I've been printing a few months and just last week entered the world of toners with some smelly but otherwise easy to use selenium. I also have a copper toning kit and plan on getting some classic sepia toner sometime. I've done some toning and would like to try split toning at some point. The most famous split tone combination I hear about is sepia and selenium, but beyond that, what other combinations make for good split tones?

A split I have used and that works well for me is sepia/blue, the colour varies from sepia to bule and green, depending on how much you bleach the print in sepia blech, I bleach back until the highlights just start to go, then tone in sepia, after washing I then tone in blue until the final print gets to the color I want, wash, this works ok with FB paper but I find works better with RC paper,

I'm becoming a huge fan of gold toner, I use a one-shot mix that will do 3-4 prints before exhausting.

Selenium before gold - warms the shadows if the selenium is done lightly; then the gold til you like the split.

For warm lith prints, much of my subject matter calls for a cool or blue tone, but I use lith for the contrast and the grain control. Gold may give a more mauve look to a very warm, orange lith print - so I give the gold a head start by bleaching to completion, redeveloping in lower-strength or full strength paper developer (gold adds density to the highs and mids, so redeveloping weak can offset this). This gives me a more neutral-warm tone. The gold has a much easier time cooling down the image this way, and you can get a split based on gold time.

The possibilities are endless. I highly recommend you grab a copy of Toning and Handcoloring Photographs by Tony Worobiec. It can be had very cheaply. Tim Rudman's toning book is considered the ultimate reference but it sells for a king's ransom.

I kind of think the Rudman book is a bit overrated at the price that is demanded, especially with what is available on the internet these days. Maybe I have just been doing this too long. Check out Eddie Ephrams Creative Elements which has a lot of good information in it and will cost you peanuts. Also the king of toning these days isn't Rudman, its Wolfgang Moersch. You might want to see what he has going on. Compared to Rudman, Moersch is like Picasso and DaVinci put together.

My advice is to learn what toners do and how they do it, then you can figure out what you want to do with them. I've done all sorts of alternative toning over the last couple decades. You can do whatever you want once you start to understand what the different toning methods actually do to the print.

Good luck and have fun!

The Tim Rudman book is excellent. One of the biggest reasons that it is excellent is that it is full of well printed reproductions that, in my experience, faithfully reproduce the tones of the examples included in it.
It is that requirement for (expensive!) faithful reproduction of tones that I expect has prevented further reprints, and has led to the high prices on the used market.
There are other interesting resources out there. And no, you cannot have my copy of the Rudman book (which I bought new at a reasonable regular price from the bookshelf of Glazer's Cameras in Seattle).

earlz said:

I've been printing a few months and just last week entered the world of toners with some smelly but otherwise easy to use selenium. I also have a copper toning kit and plan on getting some classic sepia toner sometime. I've done some toning and would like to try split toning at some point. The most famous split tone combination I hear about is sepia and selenium, but beyond that, what other combinations make for good split tones?

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direct sepia, followed by selenium is all I ever used but that with success.

I'm loading up on toners now. Should have: brown, sepia, selenium, and copper to play around with now. One really interesting recipe I found in The Darkroom Cookbook is a recipe for Polytoner. It's apparently a long discontinued toner that did split-toning alone. Recipe:

* Distilled water 500ml
* sodium carbonate monohydrate, 160g
* kodak brown toner 320ml
* rapid selenium toner 80ml
* water to make 1L

Anyone else use this recipe or the actual product when it was still in production? From the results I've seen, it should give some really interesting results, and I'm all about it being an easy 1 bath solution (well technically 1 chemical + 1 water bath that's separate from the rinse)

I think Moersch Carbon Toner is similar, as was Agfa Viradon. Been wanting to try above ecipe, but did not have a chance so far.

Lars

Don't forget Thiourea toners. You can change the A/B ratio and get sepia tones from golden to chocolate.