Re: When to tone?

I actually never bought a single bottle of liquid emulsion... I just
started making mine from scratch without buying a bottle... But based
on what I hear, they are pretty cold-black tone emulsion that is
difficult to shift hue in selenium toner. Some company... forgot
who... made a warm tone emulsion which you might want to try. I also
heard factory made liquid emulsions are difficult to use for lith
printing successfully. If you make your own batches, you'd have
control over these things :-) though which variables to control are
not well described in literature.

The staining you saw was most likely due to insufficient fixing. Make
sure to give good continual or intermittent agitation during
fixing. This is very important with hand coated material because it's
easy to coat too thickly (and the images look good that way!). Also,
this problem is more likely to occur if your fixer is exhausted. Rapid
fixer has higher processing capacity, but if you use ordinary sodium
thiosulfate fixer, use it at FULL STRENGTH and two stage fixation is
recommended. At any rate, half strength fixer is much less effective
especially with sodium thiosulfate. If you are concerned about
potential image bleaching, use a neutral (or alkaline) pH fixer, though
I don't think this is a problem in reasonable processing procedures.

--
Ryuji Suzuki
"Reality has always had too many heads." (Bob Dylan, Cold Irons Bound, 1997)