I mixed (for the first time) Formulary's hypo alum toner yesterday. I added alum after entire portion of hypo has dissolved following the instructions. It seems that alum does not dissolve - it is still plenty of yellowish precipitate in the beaker. Is it normal? Should I wait until it dissolves or ignore this precipitate?
How warm was the water? Often, water must be warm in order to disolve powders well, but always check first because some things generate heat when disolved. You should be fine with the alum on score that though. Try heating the beaker and stirring to see if you can get it to disolve.
- Randy
I did not measure the temperature exactly but the water was pretty warm. I am heating/stirring the solution now for a couple of hours and the precipitate material does not go into solution. I think I will give it a try with toning but I guess there was some impurity in water (even though it was supposed to ultra pure one)
I've had issues with Formulary pre-mixed chemisty. I always try to buy the raw materials and mix it myself. I
The grung will never go into solution, but thats ok, it will work just fine. You will have to heat it to about 125f to get it to tone. I like to use a water bath with 2 larger trays forming a clam shell with a smaller tray floating inside holding the toner and print, this makes it easy to add hot water to the bath and holds the heat a bit longer. Toning time will be from 10 minutes to 45, depending on the paper and how hot the toner is. It will improve with use and age, and get even grungier. I think the brown tones from hypo alum toners are much richer than the bleach and redevelop sepia toners, which I always found sickly yellow.
This stuff is pretty easy to make from scratch with out having to mail order. Spent print fixer will work to start with if you heat it up and cook some waste prints to add silver to the mix. Its not a bad idea to fix and hypo clear after toning.
I tried to tone yesterday. Formulary's kit contains also some silver nitrate and potassium iodide. I added silver nitrate and after initial "burning" two 5x7 prints the toner started to work pretty well. I did not like cold sepia tone it gave so I added potassium idodide. The tone was much warmer but also much more subtle. Without potassium iodide the toner converted the prints to just sepia prints but after addidng iodide it gave just a shade of warm tone to the prints. I did tone some of my test AZO prints developed in amidol and in edwal platinum II. It seems that the final tone depends on the developer used and edwal developed prints are a bit more sensitive to the toner.
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