by Alexandra Krasne, assistant editor

Joan Korsch

Like much of her work, "Garden Gate", a project for a San Jose-based dentist, began as a photograph (second image). Korsch, in Photoshop, added sketch lines and softened the sharp edges.

One of Korsch's most sucessful projects is a line of christmas cards. A photo of a dreary fireplace became (below) a homey holiday scene, thanks to Korsch's proficiency in Photoshop.

A picture of dilapidated shacks in the California ghost town of Bodie was turned into a sepia print by Korsch

"While I was in chemo," the fifty-something Korsch says, "I thought I could catch up on my reading. But chemo gets to the brain, and the radiation treatments made me tired."

So the self-professed workaholic, who spent the past 20 years surrounded by the stress of 90-hour weeks in her applications programming job, was reduced to spending her days resting from massive doses of radiation.

But her greatest fear was not the cancer that could conceivably take her life. Korsch was afraid, most of all, of not being able to pursue her dreams.

Miraculously, her cancer was cured, and Korsch was given another chance at life. She knew she wanted to end her high-stress days as a programmer, so she started giving another career path some serious thought.

Now more than three years after her cancer was cured, Korsch is seated at a Mac in a small room in her San Bruno home, patiently altering a photo from her last trip to Hungary. With a smirk on her face, she relishes each tedious adjustment of the image on the screen.

"Photography was my hobby, and I was always thinking, 'some day,'" Korsch says. "While I had cancer I figured some day might not come."

Now Korsch approaches her new career path--as a professional photographer and computer artist--with the zeal of a child discovering a forgotten treasure.

The week she ended radiation therapy, Korsch was notified by the Academy of Art College in San Francisco that she had won a scholarship. Finalizing her newly drawn plans, she bought a new Mac and accepted the scholarship. Once she enrolled at the school, Korsch instantly became enthralled with a mixture of computers and photography.

Making the transition from programming to photography and digital art was a natural one, she says. Programming, not unlike photography and image manipulation, is a creative art.

But there was a trade-off she was willing to accept. Her stress levels in her new profession have been reduced, but so has her pay.

"What I'm doing now is not as lucrative, but I enjoy life more," she says with a little laugh. "I have freedom and I'm my own boss."

Vowing never to work for someone else, Korsch founded Joan M. Studios, which she now runs out of her San Bruno home. But one of the challenges Korsch had in leaving her career as a programmer was attracting customers and generating revenue.

In one of her first self-promotion campaigns, Korsch took photos of ballet and other dance shoes. Then, she scanned the photos into her computer and manipulated the images to create greeting cards and posters.

To market her products, Korsch got a national phone book of dance shops and mailed them offers for free posters. Once she created demand, her business got recognition and started to pick up.

After the dance posters, Korsch created a line of Christmas and holiday cards. It is through the dance and holiday cards that Korsch makes most of her revenue.

But her real love is travel. During the lag-time between the holidays and dance season, Korsch "explores the endless variety in the world."

On her trips, Korsch takes many photos, which she later manipulates in Photoshop or Painter and sells as framed digital prints off her Web site, www.joanm.com.

One of her favorite travel destinations is Prague, Czech Republic. The cobblestone streets and old-world architecture lend themselves to interesting compositions, she says.

One photo she took in Prague, called, "On the Way Home," features a woman with an umbrella who is strolling down a cobblestone street on a drizzly morning. After scanning and manipulating that photo, Korsch created an image of the woman walking in a pouring rain.

Korsch says she achieved the cold and rainy effects by creating a sketch layer in Photoshop and adding it to the image. "I like the sketch look and the layer of sketch lines," she says. "I played with the opacity and put a layer of lines that look like a sketch. Then I used the magic wand to drop out some of the image."

Work and leisure travel have also taken Korsch on trips to Hungary. There, she photographed an apartment with a very old-world architecture look. An ominous arched doorway lurks at the center of the image. In the finished composition, which was manipulated in Photoshop, she framed the dark arch with pastel pinks and mauves and completed the look with a layer of sketch lines.

"What has been said to me was that the process looks like it was done on paper negatives," Korsch says. "There is a lot of noise and grain with muted colors."

Korsch then printed the final image on matte paper, giving the apartment image a misty dreamlike quality that bears a resemblance to an airy watercolor painting mixed with a dark charcoal sketch.

Although she enjoys traveling to Europe, Korsch has also been known to turn her camera on subjects a little closer to home. Using a photo taken at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, she composited a photo of a young girl from a previous photo shoot and manipulated it to look like the girl is playing hide-and-seek in between a row of columns.

"There is a girl in the shot who I shot in the studio," Korsch says. "I'm playing with other things [to put in the image in place of the girl]. I want it abstract and I want to add another layer and then flip it. I can meld things effortlessly because of all of the retouching work I've done for photography studios."

Some images Korsch scans into her Mac require less retouching than others. On a trip to Bodie, a ghost town in the Sierras, she used her camera to peer into the dilapidated shanties from years past. With a small amount of manipulation, Korsch was able to give the image her own personal touch.

"The sky came out a very bright blue because [Bodie is] so high up," she recalls. "It was a color photo, and I brought it into Photoshop and made it a black-and-white. Then I made a hue saturation adjustment and that made it look sepia."

As with most new Photoshop users, Korsch experimented with the various filters the program had to offer. But she soon set some rules for using them. "I never use a filter straight," she warns. "I have found that people get carried away."

Sometimes her clients get carried away. One image in particular Korsch completed for her dentist, who wanted an image that was reassuringly soft. "She drove me crazy," Korsch says. "She wanted soft images, not thorns or sharp instruments. And she wanted it to be more painterly."

The finished piece is called "Garden Gate." Korsch took a picture of a yellow adobe wall in New Mexico and softened it. To add an ethereal look, she added flowers from another picture. The final image is filled with purples, pinks, and soft blues. She also created a special sketch layer for this particular image that softened up some of the harsher colors and created a painterly, sketch quality.

A print of "Garden Gate" now hangs proudly in the San Jose dentist's office. But it took six months to create an image on which both Korsch and her dentist could agree.

After winning both health and career battles, Korsch looks back at her programming days and shrugs. She realizes that having cancer was both a blessing and a curse. The disease freed her from her previous job and gave her the guts to seek happiness.

"Now I'm happy. I could get back into [programming] and make lots of money, but I want to be happy," Korsch says. "I like working on my own; I'm in control. Working for someone else, I can't do what I want. Now I have freedom. I can travel when I want. I still have deadlines, but when you enjoy it, it's not the same."

  Copyright 1999 Cygnus Publishing — all rights reserved.