Is toning necessary to preserve prints?

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Is it necessary to tone prints to preserve them? I'm not interrested in changing the tone, but have heard that prints need to be toned in selinum so that they won't change over time. One person told me toning was especially necessary when using RC paper. Also when I did some toning years ago,I did it as a separate process. Does it work just as well to use a third tray. Chris Bicch cbirch43@hotmail.com

-- Chris Birch (cbirch43@hotmail.com), July 20, 1999

Answers

Toning is only necessary if you don't want your prints to fade. Sorry about that, I couldn't help myself this early in the morning.

You must tone (after properly fixing and washing the print) to prevent fading. RC paper is going to fade relatively quickly compared to fiber paper, but toning will delay that fading. You will be pleasantly surprised at the tonal change, especially when using fiber paper. I prefer to tone immediately after washing. Do not tone in a third tray after fixing. You must wash the print thoroughly before toning or you'll get horrible stains all over the print and have to start over again. No, I haven't made this mistake myself (one of the few darkroom mistakes I haven't made) because I read the directions that came with the selenium toner.

Get the Ansel Adams series on photography. Read it and you'll have the answers to these and many questions you wouldn't think of for years on your own.

Now if I had just read the directions before installing a new hard drive in my computer...

-- Darron Spohn (dspohn@clicknet.com), July 21, 1999.


From my experience, toning is not absolutely necessary to prevent fading, and one can definitely not say that all RC prints "fade very quickly". A properly processed RC print can last quite long w/o noticeable degradation, particularly when kept in the dark rather than in a frame in the sunlight. In fact, I have some RC prints that are approx. 20 years old. They are still OK, and I didn't know too much about proper processing then. After that long a time it is, of course, hard to say whether there is any shift in tones, but they still do look OK to me.

It is true, however, that toning, especially sepia and selenium toning, will improve the stability of prints. I would also believe that properly processed FB prints have a greater potential to survive a few generations than (even properly processed) RC prints, because not much is know about the long-term stability of the RC substrate.

So I guess the answer to your question depends on what you intend to do with your prints:

For optimum stability (to be expressed in centuries), particularly of prints which are exposed to light, use FB paper, and tone it in dilute selenium or sepia toner (the latter resulting in a change in color to brown).

For the next 20 years, particularly when the prints are stored in the dark, RC w/o toning is OK.

These are the extremes.

-- Thomas Wollstein (thomas_wollstein@web.de), July 26, 1999.


Agfa makes a product called sistan and it is clean simple and goes a loooong way and makes the prints goe a looooooonnnnnng way too. Oh yeah, it doesn't tone the image to different shade.

-- kirk kennelly (kirk@ioa.com), July 28, 1999.

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