Toning with lith prints has always been something that has been difficult for me to really grasp how to properly use. Many of my best lith prints are extremely colorful and then I try toning them and I just end up shifting to a worse color spectrum, or even taking most of the color out of the print. However, I didn’t feel like my report on EXA6 can really be complete until I tried toning a few. So, that’s what I did. I did quite a number of test prints, but these are the ones that I thought looked especially interesting. Also, just general notes:
MGV RC paper will respond very quickly to gold toning. It can be difficult to get a subtle bit of blue highlights, rather than changing both highlights and midtones. It responds about normally with selenium toning though.
If a lith print comes out as having rather subtle and neutral (boring) colors, that’s basically the perfect blank slate for toning.
Selenium on most lith prints will behave differently than a normal print. It produces brownish reddish shadows, rather than the typical purple shadows as with normal prints. However, leaving it too long will get to a brownish purple. Selenium is also extremely slow to affect the highlights of a lith print, even at strong dilutions like 1:5.
If you do gold toning after selenium, without a lot of time it won’t really do much to anything the selenium toner lays down.. With a lot of time though it’ll turn it the distinct gold blue as well though.
Note that all prints here were the prints that were scanned in the previous EXA6 reference blog post. So, you can go to that blog post to compare the toned vs untoned look. Each print was carefully color adjusted to match the look of the print in daylight as much as possible.
Michael’s One Shot Gold Toner Formula:
6g ammonium thiocyanate (60ml 10% solution)
2-3ml of 1% Gold Chloride solution
Make to 1L of water
The toner will typically only work for 2 or 3 prints, depending on how much toning you do to the print. It can be refreshed as you go with 1-3ml more gold chloride when it seems to stop working. Michael reports it as being “slow” and recommends hot water to speed it up, but I personally see it as being rather fast, too fast in many cases. Will produce cool blueish tones, especially in highlights.
Fomatone FB EXA6 lith print put into selenium toner until the upper shadows (hair) was properly darkened and became a bit brown, then gold toned until the highlights were cooled down some. Note: this paper has a naturally quite warm yellow base, this is why the print’s “whites” look so warm despite being gold toned.
Ilford Cooltone FB EXA6 lith print, put into very vigorous gold toner until everything seemed to be thoroughly cooled down. The exact look of this print is difficult to capture with scans. Also the spots and blemishes are due to me not being the most clean in my printing and toning technique with FB papers