Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 22))

be used but very little, unless the picture is to be looked at through some
dark peephole arrangement, when an unintensified plate will look gray and
bleached.
For the way the average Autochrome is shown, if it is properly exposed
and developed, intensification is unnecessary. If, however, intensity of
color is wanted, the resources are certainly there. The garish false color one
sees in so many plates is purely due to too much intensification; whatever
defect there is in the color rendering by the plate, whatever incongruous color
arrangement may have been perpetrated, trust the intensification to make it
obvious. But the same holds true of a beautiful harmony of color. The
stronger the colors the more beautiful they seem and the more vital becomes
the harmony. The simplest manner, of just slightly building up the image,
is by immersing it in an Agfa intensifier, 1-15, for about a minute. This
solution can also be applied locally with a soft camel's hair brush, to intensify
a color or build up a black, but its capacity is a limited one. Where a rich
dark effect is desired the mercuric iodide is capable of very beautiful results.
It also slightly changes the general tone, making it warmer and more golden
—carried to its extreme limit in portraiture, one can produce the golden
luminous glow that varnish gives to an old master.
Another great point for the mercuric iodide is that its darks are never
opaque, as with the nitrate of silver or mercury. If the mercuric iodide
image is still not intense enough, it can be further built up by a weak so-
lution of bichloride of mercury, followed by a blackening in a developer.
In extreme calls for blacks ammonia may be used to re-blacken, with aston-
ishing results—but this makes the emulsion very brittle, and it shows a
tendency to crack in a short time. Where a regular building up of the
image is desired the Lumière nitrate of silver intensification is the best-
and the only one to be recommended for lantern slides.
For Reducing, a weak solution of the acid permanganate bath is very
satisfactory—½ ounce of acid permanganate in 16 ounces of water. But the
hypo-ferricyanide reducer is better when the image is very flat, as it has the
tendency to act more strongly on the high lights. But any reducing other
than what might be called a clearing up of the high lights, should be
avoided, as the delicate colors are sure to suffer. However, under-exposed
plates which would ordinarily be useless, can sometimes be saved by clear-
ing and then intensifying. The black spots which occur only too frequently
in the plate can best be removed by touching them on the dry plate with a
fine brush dipped in a strong hypo-ferricyanide solution. If they are re-
duced too far, it is easy to build them up again with a little color. For the
retouching of light spots a little lampblack water-color will nearly always
answer the purpose. I prefer to do this spotting before the negative is var-
nished, as the retouching is fixed in this manner.
It is astonishing how easy it is to do local reducing on the plate, and
the professional photographer who is worried about moles and wrinkles can
remove them as readily as he can on a black and white negative. This work
is all done on a dry positive placed on a suitable retouching desk. The