I am familiar with most of the basic silver replacement toners such as selenium, sepia and brown toners. I am interested in doing some toning with red, blue and perhaps other colors but I have no experience with any of those on the market. I know that both Edwal and Fotospeed offer such toners.

Does anyone have any experience with such toners? How easy/toxic are they? Can you control the intensity/gradation of the color? Is there an added archival charachteristic as with sepia or selenium? Thanks in advance.----Paul

-- Paul Swenson (paulphoto@humboldt1.com), March 14, 2000

Answers

Actually, the toners you mention do not replace the silver, but convert it to a more stable compound (silver sulphide and selenide, respectively, instead of elementary silver).

Beyond these, I only have pracitcal experience with gold toner which can be used after sepia to give reddish tones, but also directly, i.e. w/o any other toning, to yield anything between a slight cooling of the image tone to a more or less blue image tone. Gold toner, too, improves archival stability.

There are a couple of other toners (such as copper) which give a range of colours, but to my knowledge, none of them is archivally stable (which is actually why I never used them). Guidance on their application as well as information on the stability of the toned print is given in Rudman's book "The Photographer's Master Printing Course", and I think the b&w printing workshop by Bartlett/Tarant lists some formulae (but does not give information on stability).

-- Thomas Wollstein (thomas_wollstein@web.de), March 15, 2000.

Iron and Copper toner are really the only useful formulas, other than Selenium, Gold, and Sulfide (in all its various incarnations)--and thay are not really useful. They are acid-fast, which means the prints need to be washed in acidified water. They are definitely not archival, though they may last long enough for whatever purposes you envision. They also have a tendency to damage the paper base.

-- Peter Hughes (leo948@yahoo.com), March 15, 2000.