I tried out DPPs HDR function, but not having any bracketed images around, I just used single images. I was fairly impressed with how it could bring out some extra detail and contrast. If I were adding contrast manually, with curves or the contrast slider, the parts that were already shaded would be pushed towards black. The HDR processing gives you detail in shadow, mid, and highlight ranges at once.

Here's a few before and after pairs to give you an idea of the changes it can produce. In many of these it also added some saturation in addition to the detail and contrast. I know it's hard to judge the images in detail from small thumbnails, but perhaps you'll decide to play with HDR yourself. For almost all images I used a 'strength' of 20, and a 'smoothness' of 10. In a few I added a 'fine' of 20.