Running a toning session

Purpose

To put a print into a toner having already proved that the print was fixed and washed properly, with an identical untoned sheet in your other hand and a written plan on the wall.

When to use it

Any evening on which a finished print will be toned, whatever the toner. The substance controls are on their own sheets — selenium and sulphide — and the bath sequence, times and volumes belong to the practical page for the toner you chose. This is the session around them.

Before you start

You should already know, from the permanence lesson, that toning repairs no processing fault and that an exhausted fixing bath leaves insoluble silver compounds that return as yellow stain the moment a toner arrives.

Print for the toner, in one session, days earlier. Eight sheets from one box at one exposure: an anchor strip, an untoned control, the print to be toned, an identical reserve because an endpoint judged by eye is judged once, an optional third for a partial treatment, a sacrifice to trim for tests, and two spares. Every sheet gets the same development time, the same two-bath non-hardening fixing at the published time and no longer, and the same wash.

Level B is the ceiling: extraction or an open window with a fan, eyewash within reach, splash protection, an apron. Any operation that would raise it — weighing a sulphide, weighing a noble-metal salt — happens on another day or not at all. Run the ventilation check before the session, not during it.

On the bench: non-metal trays that are not your printing trays, dedicated tongs, a holding dish of plain water, the labelled waste containers, and the plan.

Procedure

The day before

1. Run the residual tests on the trimmed strip from the sacrifice sheet, and do not tone until both have passed.
2. Write the session out on one sheet and put it on the wall: every bath and its volume; every time, marked as a clock time or an endpoint; the temperature band; the ventilation arrangement; where each waste container stands and which tongs belong to which tray; and where the session stops, which is the end of the wash rather than the moment the print looks right.
3. Mix any toner that has to ripen, and check the next day that it has.

Setting up

4. Take the acid stop bath and every other acid out of the room if the toner is a sulphide or a thiocyanate, and take the paper and negatives out with them.
5. Set the waste containers out, labelled and open, before the first tray is filled.
6. Lay the trays out with the lights on, water dishes filled first.
7. Mix the toner last, at the maker’s dilution and temperature, and record what you achieved.
8. Fill the holding dish with plain water and put the untoned control in it, wet, beside the toner.

The run

9. Rewet the print by the route the toner’s own page specifies, and record which route you took.
10. Start the timer as the print goes in, and agitate as the maker directs.
11. Do not watch it continuously. Continuous watching makes a gradual change invisible.
12. Lift the print at intervals with the toner’s own tongs, drain it, and lay it beside the wet control under one named light. Write a word each time, and write the time.
13. Take it out before it looks right. Toning continues into the wash, and the only way to learn where “before” is, is to have the untoned sheet in your other hand.
14. Stop the action by the toner’s published route, and give the stop and the wash identically to every piece, including the control.
15. If the print goes back for more, record it as two immersions with a stop between them. That is a different treatment from one continuous immersion of the same total length.
16. Dry every piece by one method, at one time, in one place, with no heat: heat drying shifts some paper and toner combinations to a cooler tone.
17. Route the waste by the substance sheet for your toner, and put nothing in a container that has held a stop bath or a fixer. Check your local regulations, which govern what may lawfully happen next.

Reading it

18. Wait until every piece has been dry half an hour before judging anything.
19. Lay the toned print edge to edge with the control under one named light — never two — and describe the hue by naming the two published terms it sits between rather than inventing a scale.
20. Measure the same patches with the same instrument in the same light as before.
21. Write the permanence statement in the terms the evidence supports, and say what it does not.

How you know it worked

• Both residual tests passed before anything was toned, and the results are written down.
• The control sheet went through every bath the toned print did except the toner.
• The lift times are recorded, not just the total, and every lift was against the wet control.
• Nothing metal touched a toner, and no toner waste shares a container with an acid.
• Every piece dried together, by one method, with no heat.
• The judgement was made dry, under one named light, against the control.

If a step fails

Step 1, a residual test fails. Rewash the batch by the full published sequence while the prints are still wet and test again. Do not tone through it: a stain that arrives after toning will be blamed on the toner and cannot be undone.

Step 4, an acid bath is discovered after the toner is out. Cap the toner and remove the acid first. For a sulphide or a thiocyanate this is the gas case, not an untidiness.

Step 7, the toner will not come to temperature. Stand its tray in a larger tray of water at the working temperature and wait. Never over a flame or on a hotplate.

Step 12, the print and the control look identical after several lifts. Either the bath is exhausted or the paper does not respond to this toner. Both are results: record the immersed time reached and say which you concluded, rather than extending the time until something happens.

Step 13, the print went past the point you wanted. That is what the reserve sheet is for. Process it, record the shorter time, and keep the over-toned print as your own reference for where the endpoint is.

Step 15, you lost count of the lifts. The treatment is then unrecorded and the print cannot be repeated. Say so on the label rather than reconstructing a plausible time.

Step 19, the hue has no name in the published vocabulary. Name the two terms it lies between and say which light you looked under. A colour word without a light is not a description.

What to record

The printing session that made the set, by its own log line. Then: the toner, its dilution, temperature, age and what it had toned before; the rewetting route; every lift time and the immersed time achieved; the stop and wash times; the drying method; the judging light; the before-and-after measurements on the same patches; the waste route for every stream; and the permanence statement with the sentence saying what it does not claim.