Adobe's Photoshop has an excelent filter called "Shadow/Highlight" used to correct, in one step, dark areas AND overexposed areas of a photo. By simple analysis, I suppose it uses some radius-dependent adaptive contrast algorithm (halo effect is typical), possibly combined with interpolation (even extra-dark or extra/white, clipped areas get very improved with this filter.
The parameters used can be seen in the dialog box below
What I would be looking for is a way to start exclusively with the parameter values given in the dialog box, apply a sequence of parameterized operations "blindly", and get back the result non-interactively (well, perhaps previewing the image while adjusting parameter sliders in some GUI environment).
Any suggestion about how to perform this with standard, well-known image-processing algorithms?