Ok, I am back.
First, I just want to say in advance that I am not as good as Andrzej Dragan. He is in a class by himself with those images.
However here is an easy way ( 4 steps)to get close to the look of his images.
(This is for Photoshop and windows):
Open your image
Do the usual Levels and color adjustments

1. On your keyboard hit: ALT- CTRL-SHIFT~ (the little wiggle thing above 1) all in the same time. This will select the lighter parts of your image.

2.Hit: CTRL-SHIFT-I to reverse the selection.

Here comes the good part:
3. Go to Layer-New Fill Layer-Solid color
and select a color something like this: #353010 ( you can play with this later as well )
4. change the layer blend to multiply

You will notice quite a bit of change.
From here on you can play with this new color adjustment layer:
you can duplicate it ( the picture gets darker ) and set the duplicate layer blend mode to Linear or Color burn.
You can have some real nice effect.
One more thing I want to mention:
do some selective blurring, sharpening dodging and burning of your image.
Generally speaking blur,burn and desaturate areas that you do not want to draw attention to and do the opposite with the parts of the image that you want to do some emphasizing.

You can go from a blend image to a nice painting like image with this technique as well.

http://kentdesign1.com/images/fiddler-copy.jpg

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Lazlo
http://www.pictures-by-lazlo.com/
http://www.kentdesign1.com/
http://www.pbase.com/sigmasd9/laszlo_gyorsok