Formulary Polysulfide toner misbehaving?

[paulbarden]

I forgot to mention that it has a strong smell of rotten eggs, which is why I tone with it on my back porch.

The toner I mixed had absolutely NO smell to it whatsoever. That too suggests my packet of toner was defunct.

[esearing]

Get the Thiourea sepia kit. Easy to mix and you can vary the tones from golden/sepia to warm chocolate by using more or less of Thiourea to Sodium Hydroxide. Bleaching gives you some control if you want to vary the tonality in highlights vs shadows.
If you decide you like sepia toning with Thiourea, the bulk components are readily available and cheap -ish at Artcraft.
Also the RC paper does not tone very well for me. Fiber paper does and warmtone papers tone easily in it.

And if your budget can accommodate - Nelsons Gold Toner which is used at 100+ degrees gives a lovely warm brown to chocolate tone on Fiber paper. But it does not go into solution easily either, but still works assuming you can maintain temperature.

[koraks]

A thiourea toner is indeed very flexible and doesn't smell. Since you only need a tiny bit of thiourea to tone a few prints, toxicity issues can be controlled quite well.

Different papers respond very differently to toning; some RC papers tone very well; warmtone papers (RC and fiber) tend to tone strongly and easily and tend towards more yellow-brown tones while neutral papers are easier to tone towards a chocolate brown. Any paper can be toned to a yellow-brown tone with subtle bleaching and a lower NaOH-thiourea ratio (relatively low pH). Bleaching and toning appear to be enhanced by using a warmtone paper developer to develop the prints - which I find is true for any toner. YMMV of course.

Thiourea fogs unexposed halides, so make sure not to use a contaminated NaOH or K2CO3 activator solution as e.g. the activator bath for your pyrocat or other film developer (yes, I found out the hard way). However, thiourea doesn't fume like sulfide does, and I understand sulfide brings the risk of fogging materials stored in the same room where you do the toning because of this. I haven't tried this though (and I probably won't either).

A thiourea toner is extremely straightforward to mix up from scratch, but commercial products are evidently fine as well and usually come with clear instructions on mixing ratios and resulting image tone.

Given the ease of use, versatility, speed and keeping qualities, I have never felt the need to "revert" to sulfide toners.

[LabRat]

Thiourea is also toxic, and contaminates work areas easily, so consider that... A sloppy worker will start getting spots on other work if not carefully handled/cleaned-up...

I did a lot of toning years ago, but evolved to understand to make the most out of the natural beauty materials can produce if well done...

Steve K