Hello, I am thinking about exploring Salt Printing and gold chloride is mentioned a lot as a toner to use in this process to give the prints some permanence. Being of a somewhat frugal mindset I was searching for alternatives and recalled reading about lithium being used as a photographic toner at one point. I do not recall where sadly. Is there any soundness to this idea or am I better off saving up for some gold chloride?
I've never heard of lithium as a toner (it sounds fascinating), let alone as a substitute for gold. I would be highly surprised if it (a) worked at all and (b) would yield anything remotely close to gold in this application.
Sadly, gold chloride is indeed quite expensive. On the upside, and little goes a long way. One gram of gold chloride will easily tone about 100 4x5 prints (or even 150-200 if the overall density of the prints isn't too high).
I do see that lithium chloropalladite is used in some formulas, most notably for the ziatype process. However, in this application it is the anion combined with the photographically relevant chloropalladite; the lithium plays no role in the final print as far as I can tell. Lithium probably is used in this application as it doesn't interfere with the rest of the chemistry.
You can find a little info here: http://glsmyth.com/alt-process/ziatype.asp
Thomas
Most likely, the lithium toner that you might have seen was actually a gold toner with lithium carbonate or some such lithium salt as an additive like the one described here at the bottom left:Originally Posted by helios1014
https://books.google.com/books?id=ql...0toner&f=false
Of course, you will feel better if you use lithium chloride...
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