RE: Toning VDB before fixing with selenium

Good luck, but I don't recommend it unless you wash your print for a
very long time before toning. Any residual silver salts left in the
paper will react strongly with selenium toner, even very dilute
solutions, and cause staining, from mild to very severe.

Most of the problems of bleach back can be avoided by toning with
gold, palladium or platinum before fixing. After toning with these
metals you will not see any bleaching of the print in the fixer, even
with very strong fixers.

Sandy

>This looks great to me, I'm off out to try it!!
>Cheers
>Kate
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Stane Kocar [mailto:stane.kocar@siol.net]
>Sent: Monday, 17 October 2005 11:19 p.m.
>To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
>Subject: Toning VDB before fixing with selenium
>
>
>Now it's quite a lot of traffic about VDB, so I can add my 2 cents.
>
>I can report about my succesful toning VDB with selenium toner (KRST)
>BEFORE! fixing.
>
>The trick is to use very dilute toner (Christian Nze said in one of his
>posts 1:200). I use 2 ml ready made toner (1+19!!!) to 200 ml water. Soon
>picture begins to change it's color from yellow-orange brown to more dark
>purple brown. Then I stop toning (usually between 3-5 min). If the
>concentration is bigger, you will get serious bleaching of the image. I use
>toner one-shot.
>After a minute or two of washing I fix for 2 minutes in 5 % hypo following
>with final wash for 1 hour. In hypo picure bleaches a little, but after
>drying this loss of density is back, and the color changes again to lovely
>chestnut brown.
>Contrast and D-max rises a little (sorry I have no densitometer to
>quantify).
>
>If anyone is interested to see the results I will try to add some samples to
>
>the web page.
>
>Greetings from Slovenia
>Stane Kocar
>
>See my gallery (sorry not toned VDB yet)
>http://www.alternativephotography.com/artists/stanislav_koear.html
>
>
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Received on Mon Oct 17 17:40:50 2005