This photo made me a huge impression; maybe have some ideas how to achieve this effect? I noticed, that first of all, it's very sharp image, tone for me doesn't matter, because it looks great in black and white. I think that Histogram could be the best point where to start from.

http://www.akosphotography.com/IMAGES/svenia600.jpg

I did some "reverse engineering" and arrived at a normal (nice, but normal) image. (see attachment).

So, retracing, the steps would be....
1) Make a good greyscale image, just converting to LAB and using luminosity would suffice here;
2) Carefully apply a lot of sharpening;
3) Apply curves to turn the histogram into something looking like a triangle with the base at 0;
4) Apply a light tint.

Rô

The simple answer is ofcourse, that its thick greasy makeup and good lights ;)

This is my attempt though, the starting pic isnt very good and theres some compression artifacts showing.

Get a good greyscale using your fav method.
degrunged the skin
Increase contrast
[optional] in my case I darkened the skin and lightened the hair
sharpened with a high pass layer.

Yes,

Lets not forget that for starters not everything is photoshopped. There are still a ton of amazing film photographers out there that do amazing work, minus the photoshop.

http://davidsharpe.com/ I worked as an assistant for this guy for many years, and not one of these images is photoshopped at all. THis is all in camera work through lights, multiple exposures, etc etc.

And that first image looks alot like agfa scala tranny film....and just toned in post process

The simple answer is ofcourse, that its thick greasy makeup and good lights interesting that you say that, nancyj, cause i was thinking it looked a lot like the original Bond movie, Goldfinger, where people were spray painted with gold paint. of course here it would have then been desaturated.

craig

interesting that you say that, nancyj, cause i was thinking it looked a lot like the original Bond movie, Goldfinger, where people were spray painted with gold paint. of course here it would have then been desaturated.

craig
Could also be that - has a very similar effect in looking thick and heavy - though probably more pleasant for the model ;)