Hi, I'm Rachel from Little Vintage Photography and Sunny 16 podcast.
Ilford have asked me to come and speak to you about how to make a selenium toned
print.
This is a way of adding a bit of colour and depth to one of your existing prints.
This one here I've exposed onto warm tone paper.
The paper I've used is the Ilford multigrade resin coated warm tone paper
to give us this starting point.
When I've added the selenium toner to it this is the kind of image that you'd finish up with.
so you can see that there's a difference in color and in tone as well.
You can also use it on other papers and it'll give you a bit more of a subtle effect.
So let's have a look at the equipment that we're going to use to do a selenium toned
print.
I'm gonna begin by putting on my gloves and safety goggles because you don't want
the selenium toner going in your eye when we're mixing.
I'm gonna open that up.
So this is the Ilford Harman toner.
It's a one liter bottle and it would make up to four liters, one plus three.
We're going to measure in 150 mil into there.
Just going to pop that lid on.
Always made sure that you put your lid straight back on.
That's our 150 mil.
I'm just going to pour into the large jug.
Okay.
And then you grab my 450 mil of water, which I'm going to just add into here as well.
And then take my stirrer and I'm going to give it a good stir.
I'm just going to take the jug and now pour it into the middle bath.
Now I've got it poured into the center tray.
We're going to look at this one over here.
This is our first holding tray, and what we've got are two prints in here.
We've got a reference print and the print that we're actually going to tone.
That gives us a chance to compare the two as it's actually toning and changing
colour.
This tray here, we have set at 24 degrees centigrade.
That's a little bit warmer than the other two trays.
In order to make sure that the prints get warmed up, ready, and will take in the
tone in a nice even way.
So we've got our first tray over here with these two prints, our selenium toner
itself in the center tray, and then a second holding tray over here, which has
just got the water in it 20 degrees.
That's for us to start to wash it at the end.
What I'm going to do is set a timer on my phone.
I tend to use one like this.
I'm going to take one of my prints, the one that I'm going to tone, and I'm going
to pop that into the center tray.
And then we just agitate and make sure it's fully covered.
And that I'm moving that backwards and forwards, and that's going to be between
two and four minutes.
So I'm going to keep an eye on my timer whilst looking back at my reference print
in that first holding tray so I can see the difference and decide how much tone
and color I'd like to add to it.
And you might be able to see that we're already starting to warm up.
This is starting to give it that much deeper, richer kind of color.
You don't have to constantly be checking, but it's nice to kind of go
"Oh, okay, I can see the differences."
as we're letting it go, so I don't want to go too far with this.
I just want to give it a little extra depth and a little extra colour.
We're coming up to two minutes.
Going to lift that out now.
There we go and put it into our second holding tray.
So it's going to 30 seconds.
I'm just going to agitate that as well.
That's going to stop the development process of the selenium toner and I can
have a quick look and see whether I'm happy with how it is.
If I wanted to give it a little bit more tone, I could just simply pop it back into
the selenium.
Yeah.
Lovely.
Okay, so that has stopped toning.
I'm gonna bring it back over now from this tray into the first tray next to my
reference print and check the two together.
If I wanted to add extra tone at that point, I could have put it back into the
toner.
I'm going to stick with it as it is.
That needs to be in the wash for two minutes.
So just in normal temperature, running water.
With a resin coated paper, you need two minutes of running water in order to
properly wash it.
If you're using a fiber base paper, you'll actually need to wash it for 30 minutes.
We've got our final prints, so this and our reference print, as you can see, and
our final selenium toned print here with the lovely rich tones on that warm tone paper.
If you want to learn more about analog techniques, you can check out Ilford's
other videos.
Thanks very much for watching.