With digital photography it is possible to do an imporessive number of post processing with digital images.  

Here is an example:

Original photo:



Two versions of recovering and redistributing the shadows/highlight:

problem is, you lose focus on the foreground image when the background becomes too light and the 2 edited photos now lacks contrast.  if possible, sometimes it's better to mask out the background before altering the light source of what you want to focus on, which in this case, is the flower, and not the messy pile of stuff in the back...

I do not know too much about editing but in the edited photos, the bright light green/yellow strip were too obvious and had created a distraction to the object.  Agree?

Well said, the background is a turn off.

I have intended to show the effect -but have chosen, of all possible examples, bad examples.  The shadow/highlight, displaying and blending to show a wider dynamic range.  What about this.  Notice that with raw format, more data is stored and hence it is possible to recover more details (notice the different levels of luminosity one can recover from the shadow).  

The trick is to avoid a complete dark pixel (zero value) or comeplete blow out (a value of 255) for which no further work can be done to recover detail   JPG format is not ideal as the compression algorithm of JPG tends to "flaten" some data in the darker zone and makes recovery of this region diffucult.  You can see some complete "black" pixels of this photo whose details cannot be recoved even with the secon version of editorial work.

Original:




Edited 1:



Edited 2:



The work  is similar to dark room techiques that photographers do with film photography to alter exposure amount on negatives and prints.