MorseBlog

The next phase of any lith printing I do tends to be toning. I never feel in control of my toning, but I manage to stumble into some interesting images as a result. Today I played with some sepia and gold toning but didn't really get anything I liked. I moved onto selenium toning as there can be some rather intense results.  Blog Post Thumbnail Image I use a 1+3 dilution of selenium which always results in strong color changes. For most of my lith the end point (to completion) of selenium toning is a rusty red almost strong sepia tone as seen below.  Wistow ORWO f11 23 sec burn sky 45 sec toned On the way to this color, it passes through a cooler almost purple tone. This led me to think about getting a combination of tones though selective toning. I have done this before, and it works well for images with a strong line like a horizon. I dip the wet print only up to the point I want toned. I try and be careful about where the toner goes. The toner effect can lag quite a bit in ...

After much upheaval in my personal life living a semi-nomadic existence in the USA and UK I have not been in the darkroom for some time. My last effort was at the very end of May just before my move to the USA. I am back in the UK for Christmas and New Years and found some time to do some lith printing. I had to look through the back catalog to find some subjects to print.  Lith Printing Recap In many ways lith printing is easier than conventional printing. The exposure is not critical, and I learned some important techniques back in 2021 that made lith finally click for me. For instance, I meter the exposure on the easel at Ev 4 (ISO 100) in the highlight areas of the image using an incident light meter. This corresponds to about 45 seconds of exposure. I usually bracket this +/-1 stop to start with. Burning helps a lot to balance the exposure on the print. Any sky wants a stop or 2 of burn to bring the tones in line with the foreground.  I also crop out areas that are too ...