A few points:
The best paper, I believe, is Arches watercolor hot press. The heavy
gelatine sizing yields stronger prints.
You can adjust the percentage of your salt solution. The salt content is
the closest thing in salted paper to a restrainer. More salt keeps the
whites bright but does not deepen the blacks, as adding restainer to
paper developer does or adding a contrast agent to platinum solution
does. Start with 2% salt (sodium chloride or ammonium chloride) and .2%
gelatine. If you have a lot of fogging and staining problems, it might
help to increase the chloride to 2.25 or 2.5%. If you put sodium citrate
in the salt solution, it should be at the same percentage as the
chloride.
Don't sensitize your paper by floating in a silver bath. A much easier
and less expensive way is to use a glass coating rod (sold by Bostick and
Sullivan). I measure out silver (12% silver nitrate in distilled water)
by the half teaspoon and spread it with the coating rod. Any excess
silver is soaked up with a scrap of blotting paper, and then the paper is
dried with a hair dryer. Then I coat again.
Your neg must be extremely contrasty to get clean whites and rich
blacks. Try to find a densitometer to measure your negs. There is no
way to judge by eye and the paper itself is inconsistent, so doing a lot
of tests with a density wedge may not be all that helpful. I aim for a
D-max of about 2.6 and a d-min of .2. That is a DR of 2.4.
If you tone the traditional way, using an alkaline gold bath, the
importance of a long pre-wash cannot be over-emphasized. twenty minutes
in cold running water should do it (cold water reduces the print less
than warm). If you find that the print fogs in the pre-wash, it is
because the free silver is not getting washed away. A helpful technique
is to use a very weak chloride bath before the pre-wash to neutralize the
free silver. Try a quick rinse in .01% chloride (table salt will do). A
pinch of salt in a half gallon of cold water works well. After the print
has been exposed put it in an empty tray and pour a cup of this solution
on it and swirl it about for ten seconds or so. Then quickly change the
solution for fresh. Three quick washes will probably prevent fog. Then
you can start your pre-wash of 15 to 20 minutes. The used chloride
solution, by the way, is loaded with silver. You can mix it with old fix
and recover the silver. If you use the "instantaneous gold toner" which
I posted to this list last week, you don't have to do any of this.
Whether salted paper is worth it is always a question. The print is
harder to make than a platinum, and less archival. But it is a beautiful
print, with many variations in color, and it really does have a primal
link to the likes of Talbot, Hill & Adamson, Baldus, Le Gray, et al, (to
paraphrase the Calumet catalog).
Luck and perseverance, Peter Mumford