Chiaroscuro Lighting which means ‘light dark’ in Italian is a type of lighting technique used for strong contrasts between light and dark. It can also sometimes contain exaggerated shadows and highlights.
It was originally used by painters but has been adapted to be used by photographers when taking photos.
How to set up Chiaroscuro lighting in the studio
There are loads of different ways to set up Chiaroscuro lighting, as long as you get those contrasts between light and dark. Below is how we set it up, we also used a reflector in some photos to help highlight parts of the face
Below are some of the photos I took which best resemble chiaroscuro lighting
Final Photo & edits
After Sorting through all my photos this photo came out as the best one.
I decided to edit The photo in Lightroom to see if I could improve it. In the end I experimented with the saturation, Luminance, clarity and shadows, I also slightly adjusted the blues on the tonal curve
(Below is the edited photo)
Yann, from your contact sheet I can see you have several good images. Select a few more and adjust in Lightroom, make sure you always produce different versions, colour & B/W, maybe also sepia tone & blue tone etc