I've noticed this effect a number of times, to various degrees.
I would guess it's a combination of makeup, lighting, and post processing, but I haven't a clue where to begin to try and archive it.
some examples:
http://flickr.com/photos/shienlee/1445859089/in/photostream/
http://flickr.com/photos/eyecandyforthebrokenhearted/1079316864/
a before and after
Any advice or educated guesses appreciated.
I'd say it's almost all post.
Most of it would be done in curves, I imagine.
The first one is just rebalanced shadows with the white point lowered, you could achieve that effect pretty easily in a levels layer then do a hue/sat layer. The second is a bit trickier, I'd use curves for that.
That sparkly bit behind the finger of the Christette is a standard photoshop brush, though.
I dunno. It looks to me like he/she starts with some pretty particular lighting and color choices. The before/after aren't terribly drastic.
Everything looks very smooth, shiny, and porcelain. I'm thinking some judicious use of noise reduction filtering and layer effects (+blurred layer in soft light, etc.)
Overuse of noise reduction often, in my experience, produces some very painterly effects.
Could you, would you, with a goat?
Hm, thanks for the input.
I am thinking color choice is a big thing I haven't put that kind of thought into before(obvious, I know.) it's all pretty unified in the first two.
I wonder if one could use that technique where you replace the colors in the picture with colors from a classic painting to archive a similar effect.
I can't wait to start playing with lighting in the uni studio.
I need to find a decent noise reduction plugin that will work on my shitty winpro CS1 machine.
wont=work?
If you convert you rshot to lab colour and run a gaussian blur on the a& b channels then convert back to rgb it kills all the colour noise but will desaturate your shot a bit.
Originally posted by: arigato
wont=work?
If you convert you rshot to lab colour and run a gaussian blur on the a& b channels then convert back to rgb it kills all the colour noise but will desaturate your shot a bit.
Stop flaunting your LAB knowledge, Ari! 
Kirra, actually there's a cool trick where you *can* replace the colors with those from a famous painting. Sometimes it works really well, others ... not so much.
Load your photo and a painting into PS. Select your photo and choose Image / Match Color. Set the source to the painting. Viola.
Here's a really terrible example:
Here are some prettier examples.
Could you, would you, with a goat?
You showed me that before, but I have yet to actually try it.
Awesome that I don't have to track down how to now. 
That's cool. Didn't realise you could do that in PS..... but for some reason it just ain't working how I expect it to... even f I use the sample images.
Yeah, I've never been able to get it to do any of that pretty stuff as shown in the link example either.
it must be ll lies.
shame, I would love to know how to do stuff like the examples. It would be bloody useful.
Originally posted by: Arsis
for some reason it just ain't working how I expect it to... even f I use the sample images.
Could you, would you, with a goat?
Aye... I got the samples to work. I must have been doing something stupid before.
Anyway, I found some more info in the livedocs but have yet to have any real success with my own images. *shrugs*
I'm sure it has to do with your target image having very neutral lighting & shadowing.
Anything contrasty or saturated seems to work worse.
I can manage a slight improvement by bumping the luminance up to 200, and fading it a bit - but nothing like what the examples suggest should be magically possible.
It helps if your target images color is spot on and already balanced. Also, if the contrast ranges of the source and target images are similar.
