Here's an easy alternative, that pretty much does it all for you, and will improve almost any shot with excessive contrast:
http://www.autohdr.co.uk/
Martin Sykes, who built this freeware program, is no longer with us, but his widow keeps the site up. You can't really beat it for quick and effective improvement. Even if you have only one image, it does a great job. You want to open the option window first time, and get rid of the watermark provision, and make the max size larger. It's pretty easy to do, and Martin even left instruction on how to do it. He accepted donations, if you thought the software was worth it.
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This was a cell phone snapshot, in pretty horrible lighting, but notice how the second one has pulled detail out of the blown highlights and blocked shadows. That's pretty much the default result in AutoHDR, but you can tweak it to make it even better.
If you want to clean up noise, you might want to try the trial version of this:
http://neatimage.com/
Neat Image is easy to use and you can use the trial version as long as you like. The purchased version is of course somewhat handier.
Unless you want to really get into postprocessing, these two will handle almost everything you need.
