In recent years toning has grown in popularity and there are a number of different toners available from several companies. After considering the benefits of gold and selenium toning last month, it seemed logical to carry out a few tests on sepia this month, especially in the light of the trouble many readers report in trying to obtain the sepia colour they want.
We decided to look at how different sepia toners would affect a standard greyscale on four different papers. The rather inclement conditions that prevailed over the 1995 festive season delayed my work, or we might have looked at further variations in dilution or timing for each toner. Temperatures of -19¡C were recorded on the thermometer at the farm in Coldstream where I live, and my little darkened room was well and truly frozen solid. Sepia toning should, like most such processes, be carried out around 20 degrees centigrade/68 degrees farenheit!
The papers were Ilford Multigrade IV, Sterling Oyster RC, Agfa Multicontrast Premium RC and Agfa Multicontrast Classic FB . Instead of choosing a negative and making prints, I used a Kodak Grey Scale Negative to produce a full range of tones from each of the four papers chosen. The idea was to maintain a consistency throughout with the toners being the only factor that would change.
Five strips of each paper were exposed to produce an identical range of tones, and developed in the same developer, RC paper for 1.5minutes and Fibre for 3 minutes. One strip of each paper was then toned as per the manufacturers instructions, and the fifth was left untoned as a reference print.
The Fotospeed, Paterson and Tetenal Triponaltoner are traditional two-bath processes where the print is first bleached and washed and then redeveloped in a toner bath. The colour of the toner can be controlled by an additive giving colours from yellow brown and mid brown to sepia. For this test I chose to make all the toners mid-brown.
The Tetenal Sulphide Toner consists of separate parts bleach and toner and is very concentrated. Instead of immersing the print in a bath, the solutions are applied using a cotton swab and act very quickly. The colour of the end result can be controlled by the dilution of the toner.
Where the prints were immersed in a bath, I gave a five-minute bleaching time followed by a wash and then a two-minute toning time. The Tetenal Sulphide Toner was applied as recommended and took less than two minutes to bleach out completely and redeveloped in less than one minute.
The whites on Sterling Oyster and Agfa's Premium and Classic all bleached out, but did yield more tone in the toning bath. However, the blacks were all weaker when re-developed, with Sterling Oyster the weakest of the three.
This would suggest that when toning prints made on Ilford Multigrade IV the highlights should be slightly overprinted to allow for the loss of density during the process. Of the toners, I found Tetenal's Sulphide Toner quick and easy to use and feel that selective toning would be relatively easy to do when using the cotton swab method of application. However, this toner does have a very strong Òrotten eggÓ smell which some photographers may find offensive.
The colours produced by all four toners were quite varied across all four papers which was to be expected, with Ilford Multigrade VI again being the paper that was the most significantly different, in that generally it produced a more neutral tone the other three papers.
Agfa's Multicontrast papers produced the most consistent brown tone and also the best range of tones in terms of contrast. They also produced the highest level of staining in the whites (strongest with the sulphide toner and RC paper) while Ilford's paper remained very clean, and Sterling stained slightly with all toners. When choosing a paper specifically for a warm sepia tone Ilford Multigrade VI should perhaps be avoided, whereas either of the two Agfa papers would be likely to give more satisfactory results.
Clearly, there are many other combinations of papers and toners, not to mention the various dilutions and additives that can be used to control the final image colour. Split toning affects can be achieved by partial bleaching and re-developing. Be prepared to test anything and everything, and break your own rules from time to time, as that produce the one-off image that is the highlight of your year. The one thing I would not recommend is to tone test strips as I did, for that is equivalent to watching grass growÉ and we all know that it grows very slowly in the depths of winter.
Les McLean