If you have a photo with lots of contrast and areas that do not stand out tool well because they are dark you can fix them up in Photoshop. A very basic and rough way to do it is to use the Brightness/Contrast Dialog Box to fix the photo. Go to Menu item Image - Adjustments - Brightness/Contrast and open the Brightness/Contrast Window Bring up the Brightness with the slider makes the darker areas lighter but also makes the colors a bit grayer. Also, a lot of the details in the brighter colors get washed out. You can re-arrange the Contrast slider to try and fix that. But you will never quite get what you are looking for if you do it this way.
A better way to fix and darkness problems is to first create a duplicate layer of your original photo so you do not destroy any of the original file data. Drag the bottom layer to the New Layer icon to duplicate your photograph on another layer. The copy layer is the one that we are going to make any changes to. Click Menu Item Image - Adjustments - Shadow/Highlight. You can adjust the amount of shadow or highlights that you want to accentuate. Click on Show More Options to get the ability to vary the tonal width of the shadows or highlights that you are adjusting.
If you find a setting that you like in the Shadow/Highlights window and you can reuse it quite often, then you can click on the Save as Default button so your preferred setting will come up automatically each time you open the Shadow/Highlights Dialog Box.
But, the Shadow/Highlights adjustments seems to desaturate the color in your photo a little bit. So, to fix that go to menu item Image - Adjustments - Curves. The Curves tool deals with your tonal ranges and values. It is probably best to make a slight S-curve on the line. That will bring a bit of color saturation back into your image or photograph.
Click on the following link to see the video tutorial associated with this page - The Shadow/Highlight Tool