Our perceptions might be flawed, but I think we all tend to develop our private methods. There's framing & focus, but they're outside this discussion. Exposure, though, is very much in the realm. And the baseline, as always, is to protect the significant highlights.
Following that creed, it can occur that shadow tones in particular have dropped below the loop. So you have to lift them up (or not, depending on your intent) in the post-capture processing stage. And there's a lot more scope for this if the original is a RAW.
To me, that's it. And anyone's going to have a tough path to tell me otherwise.
