selenium negative intensification - does this give richer highlights?

Can anyone with experience selenium intensifying tell me if they

notice richer highlights? It's common knowledge that selenium toning

prints yields richer shadows, but I'm wondering if I can get the best

of it all by intensifying my negatives to spread out my highlights

then toning my prints to spread out my shadows.

I've read so many posts re selenium intensification in the past few weeks that I'm wondering if Amazon.com had a sale on St Ansel's books.<P>I've tried intensification in an attempt to save wrongly developed (extremely thin) negs. The process added about a half stop of contrast to the resulting prints. Today I wouldn't bother -- I'd just scan them as I'd get better results with Photoshop (a process I'm really beginning to dislike -- but thats another story).<P>I believe that intensification had a more useful purpose in the past -- back in the days of graded papers. Back then you could only get papers in two or three grades. Because of that you saw a lot more of the voodoo that St Ansel wrote about because printers used heroic measures in their attempt to turn a #2 paper into a #4 paper.<P>Today with your wonderful Variable Contrast papers you can split grade print to your hearts content. That, instead of negative intensification is an art that is worth learning!<P>And once you've mastered that or if you find your highlights don't sparkle -- drag out the potassium ferricyanide and start selectively bleaching as that too is an art in itself.

Selenium toner works on the existing silver which becomes silver selenide. If you use it to increase the density of thin negs, it will not do much to the shadows but will increase the contrast by increasing the density of the highlights. Same with any neg. It increases the contrast of the negative. Whether this is what you mean by richer, only you will know. If you have a flat neg, one where the contrast is below a couple stops, then intensify. If your neg is already at the 5 stop spread that will print as a full tonal range, then don't intensify. If you haven't used seleniuum as an intensifier, try it on a neg that isn't important first. See what it does.