Wye Forest Blue Toning

Introduction to Iron Blue Toning

I got a few acceptable prints from the Wye forest printing session. I decided to try some blue toning. I have found that blue toning works well in foggy forest scenes. 

I use the Moersch MT4 Iron Blue toning kit. The kit is simple in that it has 4 parts that you mix with distilled water. There is also a clearing solution to mix. I mix all this as single use. I tend to make 500ml for 8x10 prints which works well in small trays. The toner doesn’t last long about an hour or two. 

I always start with my old test prints to establish tone and timing. Blue toner changes color under different conditions. With denser/darker images the blue is less apparent and more cyan in lighter toned images. Length of time in the toning solution also effects the tone as more silver takes up iron. There is a sharp break for instance between 30 seconds and 60 seconds. 30 seconds delivers an understated dark blue tone while 60 seconds is much stronger. 

You can also move the tone back in an alkali bath as this bleaches out the iron toner. (Moersch provides 10% ammonia to make this bath as well.) This depends on the strength of the bath and time in the bath. Fifteen seconds gets a huge shift. (3ml in 1/2 liter of water) Given long enough all the blue disappears. 

Here are some my tests taken from one image. I annotated each section to illustrate the range of colors and techniques.

Blue Toning Experiments

The lower right corner has an example of toning then bleaching in ammonia and retuning. The tone comes back close to the original above it but not quite the same.

My methodology is to tone for a specific time (30 or 60 seconds), brief water rinse, clearing bath for 3 minutes, 5 minutes wash. The clearing bath clear up most of the yellow from the potassium ferricyanide and the final wash clears the highlight completely. Washing longer than 5 minutes begins to fade the blue tone.

The Prints

Wye Forest no1 Print (Blue toned)

Wye Forest no2 Print (Blue toned)

Wye Forest no3 Print (Blue toned)

Wye Forest no2 Print (Blue toned with ammonia)