How to achieve this effect?

I saw this on Car & Driver and was mesmerized by how clean the edit is.
Can anyone let me know how I can do this on LR? Or what the effect is called? Thanks.

http://dicaprio.my1.ru​/_ph/63/384601470.jpg

http://blog.bestitalia​nleather.com …dbab9c20a6ee2d3​2d22e3.jpg

http://www.hdwallpaper​scool.com …amazing-hd-wallpapers.jpg

I don't use LR, but think you mostly need to start with the lighting ratios. Then, maybe try this: http://www.jasontopia.​com …movie-300-photoshop-talk/

As mentioned, the right lighting. But, also desaturatiin, dodging & burning, vignetting, smoothing, and maybe a little gradient map, s set to black and white set to soft light. Don't know if Lightroom has the equivalents of those ps features.

The EXIF data says this was done with Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh.

Even if it can be done with Lightroom it would probably be much easier to do with a Photoshop type editing program. Most of the actions I have seen for Lightroom to process a photo such as this one has been processed export the photo into another program. I am sure it can be done with a photo editor other than CS3, but Lightroom is not a program designed to make changes such as this to photos. If you wish to edit programs in this manner, might as well start looking into full featured editors.

Since you say you are using Lightroom (you didn't mention another editor, or Lightroom "plug-ins" that expand LR's functions, let's go back to the beginning:

Lightroom has Develop tools that have been expanded and improved on, assuming you have a relatively recent version (I believe LR 4 and the later versions)...

One place your could experiment in would be the Develop Presets panel, people have contributed a ton of presets achieving a variety of special effects!

But, the more "Basic" approach is to start with the Develop Basic section...there are a lot of good tools in there but you need to experiment, practice, learn, and do it some more! as you scroll down the Develop Module, you will see other types of tools!

But those "at hand" tools work with the entire image, although you can play with things where you can selectively work with color and tonal ranges once you start working with the Tonal Curves and the HSL Panel, plenty of things to play with!

But then, one of the relatively recent tools found in the LR Local Adjustment Brushes. These have given LR some substantial "leaps" in working with stuff that you previously had to go to Photoshop (or a similar app) where you could have multiple layers and "brush in" a variety of effects, things that LR and other Raw processing users had to have these apps on hand and only dream about those crazy capabilities coming into LR...!!

But again, experiment, learn, practice, learn, repeat, repeat, repeat!

Step 1: Really good light
Step 2: Good gear
Step 3: Lots of PS, including heavy use of dodge and burn, high pass, inverted high pass, probably some form of split frequency or maybe just really anal cloning and healing, individual adjustments to the various channels, etc etc. My estimation without seeing the before's? A full day retouching per image.

With LR you might be able to get close to mimicking the color tones, but you probably won't be able to do that high end skin retouch and get that look of clarity they have. Exactly how? Well, I'd start start with playing with the blacks (I assume shadows were deepened, but can't be sure w/o seeing the original), add reds to them, up the clarity slider, clean up the skin (is there a DnB function on the newest LR? If so, dodge the highlights, burn shadows...emphasis on watch), add vignette to taste....viola?