[miro]

Funny. So the DR was too high, and with burning and dodging they brought it down to get a more contrasty, low DR image.

Luckily, the standard tonal curves of cameras do that for us already.

Unfortunately the tonal curves does not do that. It is local adjustment.It is time consuming process even that software like photoshop and lightroom make it much easier.  I'm afraid that you are talking to something different.

Here is the wiki link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodging_and_burning