When faced with a serious dynamic range in a photograph -- i.e. bright highlights as well as darker shadows -- where detail is important, you have two options. First, you can use HDR and that will give you the type of exposure that you see with your eyes. In other words, the highlights will be well exposed showing excellent detail and so will the shadow areas. Second, you can use the sliders in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw to brighten the shadows (the shadows slider) and darken the highlights (the hightlights slider). If the contrast is too extreme, then the best technique to use is HDR. In this particular example of a ceiling in one of the rooms in the Bled Castle in Slovenia, I evened the tones in ACR. You can still see that the lighting is not even, but that's fine. As long as there is good detail without overexposed highlights or black shadows, the picture works.
I shot this image with a 14mm lens hand held.
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