You don't paint the brights in over top; you paint the shadows where they need to go. You're painting the negative, not the positive space.
If you can’t go where the photos are honey shoot the ones you’re with
The "things" in a picture include both the things themselves and the negative spaces they leave behind; the foreground and the background; the colors and the shadows. If the "things" don't all work together, you don't have a good shot.
Weekend Warriors!
Taking the time to line up a shot, to imagine how it's going to look when you're done with it, to just sit there and think about what you're going to shoot next, is an amazing exercise in mindfulness.
AI can’t even put hair on a cat.
One cool thing about AI integration: it can figure out what a picture is probably about and sort out "subject" pixels from "background" pixels with reasonable accuracy. For that sort of thing, it's an incredibly useful tool that I'm glad to have in my arsenal.