How to achieve this photograph effect?

I'm kind of getting into photography, not a big camera guy meaning I don't have a $600 Canon or Nikon, I use a regular digital camera and then touch up the pictures in Photoshop CS6 and Color Efex Pro 4.

I really like the lighting effect used in these pictures, is there any way I could come close to creating it, maybe mixing different channels or something?

Any help will be appreciated, thank you!

My guess is that it is oversaturated and overexposed and possibly has too-high contrast.

Start with a properly exposed image.
In an editing program, increase saturation, brightness, and maybe contrast until you get this effect.
Save the settings so you can recall them later.

I do stuff like this with GIMP (which is open source = FREE)

National Geographic and Life Magazine sites are good places to download properly exposed images to experiment with.

You can move the slider to adjust the saturation to overly saturate it and use the brightness/contrast slider to adjust those two things in order to make it too dark and have too much contrast. Once the picture looks as terrible as the ones you posted you're all set.

There are lots of software can make this effect, but i recommend you one i just used named Fotor, it is a free online photo editor software, very easy, you can choose the lomo effect, try it
http://www.fotor.com/features/lomo-effect.html, hope you like it!