my photo exercises: The Dave Hill look

This is all about the Dave Hill look. Check out his work here. This is a look often used for edgy gritty art, like rap album covers.

Apparently I have discovered "the Dave Hill Look" long after everyone is already sick of it, but I am going to try to reproduce it. It calls for

1)hard light. Without the hard light it just doesn't work. Preferably rim lights.
2) All the details and textures are emphasized. This is done through a high pass filter and/or unsharp mask
3) skin tones need to be smoothed out- the additional detail will bring out every flaw in skin, so the skin must be smoothed out
4) Dodging and burning. The highlights need to wash out, and the shadows need to be very dark. This is usually done with a 20% opacity brush. With CS@, dodging and burning as a destructive sequence are no longer necessary. You can simply fill a layer with 50% grey, set to overlay mode, set default colors to white and black, and then do pixel level dodge and burn by painting white or black on the grey layer. Again, use a soft brush and low opacity.
5) I suspect that the contrast must be boosted. No one seems to make mention of it though. I used both levels and curves.

Here are some links to the Dave Hill effect.
1) reproduced on the strobist flickr website
2) by photoshop guru Scott Kelby on his blog without the use of plug ins
3) by Scott Kelby with Lucis plug in where he at least shows how he dodges and burns as well as uses multiply to vignette the edges.

After trying to do this a few times, I think there are a few things missing
1) luminosity masking- can greatly facilitate the dodging and burning
2) you can use the smugmug sharpening ratios to determine which areas get sharpened at what radius to keep everything as sharp as possible. The different radius numbers sharpen different items. you ideally select the sharpest ratio for each object or texture.

It really surprises me that no one has really been able to decipher this effect yet.

Here is an example I tried using the high pass filters, but not the raw tools. I did not bother with the skin smoothing since Superman has perfect skin. I also did not introduce noise because I did not feel that the picture warranted noise. Ideally, your subject photo has a lot of rim lighting and hard shadows, but this is what I had to work with unless I wanted to Dave Hill a rim-lit watermelon.

First the untouched photo