Check out http://www.victordemello.co.uk/flash/index.html

In the top nav bar, go to "Fashion 1" gallery and click on the "tattoo" subgallery.


My question is, how does he get those skin tones like that?? I mean, it seems the first trick is to use a small yet soft light source. But how does he get the colors to look so earthy and grungy and desaturated-esque?? Obviously there's an add noise step in there somewhere, but other than that I can't figure it out.

Looks like that was done with techniques similar to what Blinkerz does with his church interiors. I got the impression you need more than 1 exposure and it seems there's a lot of blending and "HDR-esque" fiddling involved. But when asked about it directly in the other thread he remained very vague.

Hi,
I wouldnt be able to say how these images were created. As you say, a lot of it starts out with the lighting, makeup etc. Then there's a million different ways to do things in raw conversion and photoshop.

One method of creating similar looks to this (which is popular amoung my colleagues) is to duplicate the image onto a new layer and set it to a soft-light blending mode. Then colorize this via Hue/Saturation, adjusting the hue and saturation to suit the desired look. Then knock back the opacity of the layer to soften the effect. This can be repeated with more and more duplicates of the original image to build up more contrast/colour effects.

Playing around with this you can achieve quite similar contrasty, desaturated, limited color images.

I agree with DaveSpanton , using a duplicate layer in Soft Light to add som e contrast an color. I also think a highpass layer set to overlay can be used to grungify it a little.

besides the skin it looks like it's been added a brown tone of some sort? the pictures are very dark as well...maybe not qualified tips, but just sharing my opinion here...