I've had pretty decent luck just boosting the shadows globally. Any unintended boosting of mid and high values can be trimmed with the "middle" slider in most editors (Preview and Gimp) and highlights separately by a slider or a "shadows/overall/highlights" tool.
I *do* at times resort to GIMP to select very dark areas to brighten without affecting the rest of the photo.
This is probably the time to use a RAW image editor and I will learn them soon.
On the mac, I use Preview.app a lot. It does the above, but does not offer editing on selections, or fixing goofs with the heal tool or airbrush. I had one photo with powerlines (gone) and one with lots of birds in the distance. I thought they were dust spots.
I can use Preview or GIMP to export an image in different sizes, but for consistency and workflow, I use Batch Photo Resizer to make small images for messaging (the Mail app lets you shrink nicely to keep the message size down).
Super Photo Upscaler upsizes images using a bunch of algorithms you can choose. It had another name. I just use these for batch processing, because I hate repeated manual operations. I used to use ImageMagick on the command line, but it has to be reinstalled with every mac upgrade. (so use homebrew).
Phone photos are massaged by the phone software and look different from camera photos. If they exaggerate, some iphone models allow RAW images as well as jpegs and heic.
TBH, most of my photos, I sharpen a tad if needed, and use the middle slider in Preview to zip up the contrast a little, and then bring up the shadows if needed, and little else. If I reduce highlights, that seems to increase the saturation, and I'll actually back off saturation or shift the temperature a little bluer (I take a lot of sunset photos). I always try the "Auto Levels" button and almost always back off, just to see what it thinks. Sometimes, startlingly bad. And with some photos, nothing. I find that it (look at the histogram) brightens the highs and moves up the black point. Often that's a nice staring point. My camera's metering setting seems to downplay the highs a bit. and the app seems to set them just below the saturation point.
But I ramble. I hope this helps. I really do keep processing simple.
Some here do use advanced photo editors. I just don't have the time, and I am happy with the results from KISS.
But the RAW files are saved in case I want to go beyond.
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