What effect is used in this Photo?

[juanyjuan]

Hey how you guys doing? im rather new to the photography game and i was justwondering if someone can help me figure out what effect or what has been done to this photo to make it look like this.... Anything will help greatly thanks
http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e396/juanyjuan/3233533494_8f67526149.jpg

 

[Big Mike]

I've moved your thread out of the 'film' section and also changed the image to a link (as i don't think you took this image).

Firstly, the photo has 'advanced' lighting. There appears to be an accent light on either side of them, besides main and fill lights. Some of those might be natural or ambient but those aspects appear to be there.

Besides that, it appears that the contrast and color saturation have been increased in post production.

 

[ksmattfish]

I agree with Mike's assessment of the lighting, and there has been some local contrast tweaking. It can be done many different ways: unsharp masking, clarity slider in LR or ACR, shadow/highlight filter in PS, tonemapping, burning/dodging, etc....

Tutorials - Local Contrast Enhancement

local contrast enhancement - Google Search

EDIT: Google "local contrast enhancement gimp" or "unsharp mask gimp". To get this sort of local contrast adjustment you want to use a low percentage/high radius USM. I often start with 10-15% and 20-60 pixel radius in Photoshop, and adjust to taste. I don't know if it's similar for Gimp.