Fomatone lith prints and long toning in Selenium. A killer!

[Mark Fisher]

I suggest "brom" papers are worse. Any hints how to agitate?

I am also a fan of Fomabrom lith'ed from certain images (I have a few in my apug gallery if you are curious). I haven't had the problems you describe. My method is to use a tray one size oversized for the developer (Rollei/Maco in my case) and float it in a tray of water. The water allows gentle, irregular agitation and also allows me to raise the temperature a bit. I've used this method successfully with both Fomabrom and Slavich Unibrom. BTW - Slavich unibrom is a lot more controllable in my experience and I tend to use it much more than Fomabrom

[AFlood]

Yep, I´ve heard so but the only bottle I own is still unopened. Expensive stuff!

The difference is that Gold toner affects the highlights first and Selenium the blacks. Hence, a good combo where selen tone the blacks and gold the lights with possibilities to find tri-split in a cool way.

Yes, go get some Selenium! (...and copper toner/blech...hehe)

Yes it is rather pricey, I deliberate long and hard before using it. Fotospeed say a litre bottle is good for 60 8x10s, but I imagine its used up much more readily with lith prints. This is an expensive hobby!

[Tom Kershaw]

Gold over Selenium, and Gold on its own both work well for Fomatone lith prints. In terms of archival processing it has been noted that Selenium is only protective of the areas that it tones rather than overall, unlike Sulphide toners; meaning the traditional advice of selenium toner at dilute solutions (e.g. 1+49) for archival protection is unlikely to work as intended.

Tom

[Fraxinus]

I've not had any trouble with flow marks on Nuance, but I have had trouble getting it to produce a result I like. Hopefully that will be remedied when I spend a few days with Tim Rudman next week...

Fomatone 131 is in a different league though, and is my favourite paper for the lith experiments I've been doing over the last couple of weeks. So far I've only explored it's 'normal' lith capabilities, the usual peachy, coffee to golden colours. I'm sure it's capable of much more and will try the extended selenium you suggest. Gold over selenium produces some lovely effects too, but in selenium for five minutes or so I just get a rather nice chocolate brown, not a lot different to the result I would get with a normally processed print left in Se 1+4 for 15 minutes.

I'm posting my recent results on my site, there's a quite a few colour variations, but probably none you haven't seen already!

Some recent experiments with 2nd-pass lith are really promising - especially if selenium toned before bleaching, then redevelopment in lith dev. None of those posted yet, still experimenting.

[schrochem]

Anyone ever try the extended selenium? That coffee phase sounds interesting.

[Roger Cole]

You fans of Nuance do know that it's going away, right? It's re-packaged Emaks and the Fotokemika plant is closing. See the very long thread about that on here.

[schrochem]

Tried it last night and it doesn't shift. Not a great tone for my taste but not bad. It didn't start to speckled the dark mid tones more on the print it tried it on.