RE: Albumen toning questions

[Monnoyer Philippe <monnoyer@imec.be>]

Albumen printing is not my speciality but from the chemistry point of
view sulfur toning would very likely work to reach a better archival
level.
I saw old untoned albumen prints, and believe me, you'd better tone it !
Sulfur toning may be achieved with the common mineral sulfides as sodium
sulfide, but you all know that.
I would use Thiocarbamide (= thiourea). The tones obtained, close to
selenium sometimes, are not as warm as those obtained with sodium
sulfide, as far as I remember my old experiments.
The silver sulfide is more stable then silver alone. It is an extremely
stable solid. Silver selenide is even more stable, but both are so
stable. No matching with Au/Pt/Pd tough.
But once you reached a certain level of archivability, going further
makes no sense unless you start to  question the archivability of the
paper itself.
Let's keep it reasonnable I would say. If not, why not heading for
platinum photoceramics ;-)

Philippe
from a rainy Belgium



-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Nelson [mailto:emanmb@yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2002 16:49
To: alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca
Subject: Re: Albumen toning questions



> 2. I thought there would probably be other toners to
> try besides gold...
> but they aren't mentioned.  How about selenium? 
> Polytoner?
> 
> 3. He's been toning AFTER fixing. Is the color
> different if you tone
> before fixing?
> 
> 4. How do you decide whether to tone before or after
> fixing?  Some people
> do one, some the other. Why?


I've only done the "before" method for
"achivalosity"/not knowing any better.  There is a
formula in Reilly's book for toning w/platinum which
goes to a chocolat brown rather than the purplish
browns of gold.  
Also a great web
resource--->http://albumen.stanford.edu/

My experience w/selenium and albumen is to start w/ a
weak solution as the one time I tried that I used a
conventional silver gelatin dilution and the results
were green and yellow looking.

Eric Nelson
Chicago

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