Lighting is mainly a soft box on either side, both slightly above head height and set back a bit to create the shadow in the middle of the face. The rest is quite a bit of fiddling around with the RAW. For comparison, here's what it looked like straight out of the camera:
Well, it fully depends on the effect you’re after. In this case there was no background to blur and I wanted her body fully in focus. The flashes are by far powerful enough to work with f/4.5 which makes focusing a lot easier. For other shots I did use the f/1.4.