Achieving soft contrast and luminosity in PS?

[Platypotamus]

In all of the photography I've done up until recently, I've been doing a lot of high contrast post processing. The effect is a flashy image that catches the eye, but is not very engaging. More and more I've been trying to move towards a much softer, low contrast "matte" look that I see in a lot of professional work. However, I haven't had much luck actually getting this look right using Photoshop CS2, mostly because I'm just trying to figure it out myself. So I'm here asking if anyone can steer me towards tools, techniques, etc that would result in the light effect that can be seen in the examples I'm linking below. I shoot entirely with a DSLR (Canon EOS Rebel). If you'll notice, the images looks very clean, containing a kind of luminosity that would not be seen in high contrast photos.

If you follow this link and navigate to his "Berlin" work:
FRANK HALLAM DAY | PHOTOGRAPHS

And navigate to this artist's "Looking at looking" section:
http://maxpix.com

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

 

[Peano]

Can't get the Flash site to work. Just one more of innumerable reasons not to use Flash. Why do so many photographers use this miserable "technology"?