How do you get a picture to look like this?

Ah, I’ve seen work like this before. It’s not something you generally do with Photoshop, unfortunately. It’s all in the photography itself. The photographer most likely uses several cameras (or takes several photos) that can individually focus on different parts of the composition, so both the people and the background can be completely crisp and in focus. They also use different lighting techniques to get all the contrast and luminosity you see. These’s Photoshop work involved too, I’m sure, but you can’t just take a normal photo and make it look like the examples you gave.

Dave Hill is a good example of a photographer who does this kind of stuff. If you click on the “Behind the Scenes” link on the bottom of the page, you might be able to get some ideas of how he does this.

@ParaParaYukiko is right if you want do make your photo really good, but if you’re looking for a somewhat “cheap knockoff” effect that you can ‘shop in a flash, try playing with the unsharp mask. High radius, low amount. Increasing the amount will make it more contrasty. Make sure not to blow all your detail. Doing a curves layer in addition can help you to save your detail. Also change the saturation (make it less saturated) and maybe make it a little sepia toned… you can do that by adding a layer of brown and then making it, say, 25% opacity on color or hue mode (whichever you think looks better).

If you bracket exposures in three consecutive shots by changing the aperture, there are programs which “knit” together the information from all three shots resulting in an image with greater depth of field and greater dynamic range than any one of the three shots. These programs are limited to this one function, and I’m sorry, but I have forgotten what they are called, however I do know that some are open source and free.

I believe the technique is called HDR.

@jaketheripper @pdworkin has it exactly right .. High Dynamic Range imaging (HDR) the technique..

..and here, for some nice examples

HDR is a really nice technique. Basically you take one picture with normal lighting, one over exposed picture and one underexposed picture.

Merging the three photos together gives a vibrant picture like that. Program here.

Note that you will not get an extension of depth of field by changing the shutter speed; you must change the aperture.

@virtualist those pictures are amazing

As others have mentioned, it is a technique knowns as HDR. These photographs were shot in RAW format, which gives you the ability to capture all the data without compressing the image file like JPEGs do. @ParaParaYukiko, photographs will never turn out like that straight from the camera. This photo was probably taken slightly overexposed, and was most certainly brought into Photoshop for post-processing.

That is the COOLEST!

@Gokey – I have to say, I agree with you.

I would guess that a great deal more took place in photoshop than not.

Even if it didn’t, the fact that a person doesn’t use photoshop doesn’t mean one can’t.

While HDR looks to be a part of the process, good lighting is what really gives the look. It looks as though it will take between 5–9 lights to get these shots done. Lots of side lighting, some hair lighting, overhead or three as well.

If you want to play with HDR Photomatix has much better HD functions than Photoshop.

Also looks like the red channel was played with quite a bit, unless dog tongues are actually that color.

You can simulate this effect by playing with the contrast settings in photoshop.

That’s how I made this picture. please disregard my scruff

The luminosity around the edges of the people in the first photograph is almost certainly the result of using an edge-detection method in one of the layers. There are tutorials for a lot of this, both for GIMP and photoshop.