Flight to Abbazja

Today let's fly to an imaginary world of Abbazja. I suppose the photo was taken in a photography studio in Kraków in the forties or fifties. I found it in my archive from that time.

This is what the original looked like:

Luckily, retouching wasn't too difficult. Small fixes here and there.

Because I like working nondestructively, I create a new layer in Affinity Photo. An empty one, on which I could paint and clone. It's important, though, to set your cloning source to be Current Layer & Below.

Retouch layer:

Before the retouch and after:

Next I used the simplest method of removing colour, Black and white adjustment in AP. I used the default settings. Since the original is monochromatic, those sliders wouldn't have much effect anyway. Colouring was done using a set of new Recolour layers and correct masking of each of them.

After the colouring process was done, I still felt like something is missing. Sunrays, that was my answer.

Two versions: with and without sunrays.