I’ve been playing around with warmtone papers and selenium toning. I started out with Ilford Art 300 but then got interested in the “normal” papers, since the eggshell texture of Art 300 doesn’t work great on scenes that feature lots of fine detail.
I decided to do a little comparison of the Ilford Warmtone (MGWT) line and the Foma Fomatone line. I printed the same scene on each paper twice, doing my best to match exposure and contrast, and then toned one copy of each paper for a total of 4 prints.
The enlargement setup I used was:
- Half-frame Kentmere 100 negative
- Printed to 6x8 on 8x10 paper
- Fomatone printed at grade 1.0 and MGWT printed at grade 2.0 (see below)
- Paper developed in Adotol Konstant
- Toned in Kodak Rapid Selenium diluted 1+9 for 5 minutes.
I was quite surprised by the results. TL;DR, Fomatone paper takes tone much, much more intensely than Ilford MGWT. And I think I prefer its look, even when untoned.
Cutting to the chase
Fomatone took toning extremely intensely. In the toned Ilford MGWT print you can hardly see the effect of the selenium, but the color shift in the Foma paper is very dramatic. These were toned at the same time, in the same tray. I would estimate that after about 1 minute of toning, the Fomatone was already at the level of the MGWT after 5 minutes.
My experience with Art 300 is that it tones somewhere in between. More shift than MGWT, but much less than Fomatone.
A couple other things I noticed as a first-time user of these papers:
- Fomatone is about 1.5 filter grades more contrasty than MGWT
- Fomatone is about 1/2x slower than MGWT (i.e. requires ~2x exposure time)
- The untoned Fomatone image is slightly (but noticeably) warmer than the untoned MGWT image in a pleasing way
- The Fomatone paper base is baaarely more cream-colored than the MGWT base
- The matte finish of Fomatone is actually a little glossier to my eye than the MGWT semi-matt
All in all, I think I actually prefer the Fomatone look. It is a little challenging being so contrasty though, since with my condenser setup most of my prints are already at lower filter grades. Might be a situation where I keep both on hand.