Is anyone able and willing to go through the steps of toning with me?I hand color my prints but I like them sepia toned. I pay the lab too much for what Iv'e heard is a simple process. Help, Joni

-- Joni Danson (dansonfamily@home.com), October 08, 1999

Answers

About the simplest is selenium toning using Kodak Rapid Selenium toner diluted at about 1:4 to 1:8 for a full color change, down to 1:15 to 1:20 for archival toning with just a hint of cooling of the image. Put it in a tray, put in the prints, agitate until they are the color you want, then into the wash. It's a good idea to use a washing aid prior to toning. Bleach-and-Redevelop sepia toning is not hard either. One bath bleaches away the black silver image, the second bath brings it back in a nice sepia tone. It is a bit warmer in color than selenium.

There are many other brands, but they are all pretty simple to use, and come with an instruction sheet.

-- Tony Brent (ajbrent@mich.com), October 08, 1999.

Yes, just buy a kit and try it. See also the printing forum, and search for the word 'sepia'.

Strictly speaking, the second bath is a toner, not a developer.

-- Alan Gibson (Alan.Gibson@technologist.com), October 08, 1999.

Does this have to be done during the initial development? And can it be done in white light or does it have to be done under safe lights? And does it matter what kind of paper you use as to the results you will get? Sorry it was a good question even if it belonged on a different forum....thanks

-- martha goldsmith (oscar@unidial.com), October 10, 1999.

You always do it after normal development, stop, fix and wash. (You might do it immediately afterwards, or could wait weeks, or even years, I suppose.) Yes, you would normally do it in white light. The results are different for different papers.

-- Alan Gibson (Alan.Gibson@technologist.com), October 10, 1999.

Sepia toning is an easy two-step process which requires no darkroom. Start from a finished print, either after the final wash or even dry. If the print is dry, soak it in water for a few minutes prior to toning.

First, you bleach the silver image. You may take the bleaching to completion, leaving only a light yellowish image, or you may choose to bleach a limited bandwidth of tones only, starting with the highlights, which go first. (Selective bleaching allows for a couple of interesting effects in combination with other toners, such as selenium or gold). Also, you might apply the bleach with a brush to bleach parts of the image only. Then, after bleaching, wash and redevelop the bleached image in the toner.

The tone of the result depends on the paper used: As a rule of thumb, FB papers respond stronger than RC papers.

Various toners are available:

Simple sodium sulphide toners smell a bit like rotten eggs. Make sure your lab is ventilated, because in high doses, this gas is not only unpleasant, but toxic. They usually come in two bottles: one for the bleach, one for the toner, both to be diluted according to instructions enclosed.

Thiocarbamide toners do not smell, at least not much. They have the additional advantage that you can influence the tone of the resulting image between a yellow-brown and a deep brown, because the toner consists of the toning agent itself plus an activating agent whose proportion controls the tone. Apart from that, the application is very much the same as for the simple sulphide toners.

A good account of this is given in Tim Rudman's "The Photographers Master Printing Course", a book that is worth reading in other respects, too. (You will surely find it on Amazon.com.)

-- Thomas Wollstein (thomas_wollstein@web.de), October 15, 1999.