Lately, I've been experimenting with using the Clipping Indicators and dragging the Histogram to insure a full dynamic range in an image. For the most part, it's a very effective way to make an image look it's best with minimum effort. Granted, we've always to use our subjective interpretative judgement as to what we want an image to say by the time we've finished messing with it. But I've found the following routine very helpful in deciding just where I want to take it. To illustrate what I mean, here's a good example of how my camera recorded an image that its matrix metering mode thought was correctly exposed.

Not very dramatic, in my opinion. You can see from the Histogram that most of the pixels are in the first and last thirds of the brightness spectrum.

My usual procedure was to work with the sliders in the Basics panel and just keep an eye on the Histogram. For this image, for instance, I dragged the Recovery slider to its max, used the Fill Light slider to get some detail in the greenery, and then adjusted the Blacks slider a bit. Sure enough, it's a dramatic improvement.

But look what happens when I just turn on the Highlight and Shadow Clipping Indicators and then drag each end of the Histogram to the point where there are very few blocked tones indicated in the image by the blue (shadow) and red (highlights) blotches. There still wasn't exactly the brightness range I wanted in either the sky or the leaves, so I just placed the cursor on the right side of the lump at the left end of the Histogram and dragged it to the right, then dragged the left end of the lump on the right end of the Histogram to the left. Took only seconds, and I ended up with this: the scene pretty much as my eyes saw it when I took the picture.