Try toning a lith print in strong selenium (1+4) for a minute, followed by gold until the highlights are neutral. This achieves more or less precisely what you describe here.What would be interesting is a warm, chocolate-y shadows with brilliant, almost cool-toned highlights.
But does it also work better/differently than partial bleaching and then thiourea redevelopment? To be honest, I don't see much in the middle picture that couldn't be achieved with just partial bleaching and then sepia redevelopment.But more importantly, the half-tone-then-redevelop method gives a subtler overall toning effect.
I've done quite a bit of experimentation with toning lately. One of my favorites turned out to be a warm sepia followed by strong selenium on a cold-tone paper.
Esearing gives some excellent points as well - you can vary the tone of thiourea sepia dramatically by varying the thiourea:NaOH ratio. In addition, if you combine it with selenium toning, there is a distinct difference between sepia followed by selenium or the reverse. First selenium and then sepia tends to give more yellowish/bland tones (even with a purple/brown sepia 'setting') while sepia followed by selenium shifts the tones more towards magenta and purple brown. By varying the bleach time/depth, the thiourea:NaOH ratio and the addition of selenium before/after sepia, you can get an almost infinite gamut of tones in the brown-yellow-purple/magenta spectrum.
If you also throw in partial/soft development, polychrome development (cf. Wolfgang Moersch) or lith printing in the mix, and add gold toner to your repertoire, the possibilities become so extensive that they are virtually impossible to chart in human lifetime. Particularly polychrome development can be interesting if you want to get more pronounced toning without the somewhat crude look of actual lith. For polychrome development, take a metol-only developer and develop until the deepest shadows are still significantly less than medium grey. Follow this by further development in a pure hydroquinone developer until the shadows are where you want them. Works best with warmtone papers; exposure needs to be about one stop more than for a regularly developed print. The effect, as said, is somewhere in-between regular development and lith, with quite warm tones in the untoned prints but without the graininess or excessive S-curve of lith.
Ammonium chloride is an interesting additive that could be added to a lith or a regular developer, but as esearing notes, it tends to fog papers. The extent to which this happens can be acceptable, but I personally find it difficult to handle.
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