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When the auto exposure button is ticked on a raw file, generally it is
the brightness slider that gets moved and the exposure slider stays at
zero. Over on luminous landscape forums, a thread said the brightness
slider controlled mainly the shadows/darker midtones and to brighten a
pic, it was preferred to use the exposure slider which will result in
less noise being brought up from the shadows.

A typical problem image is a landscape that includes some sky. What
is "auto" doing? Does it analyze each picture like rawhsooter's alt e
did? I like to use it as a starting point and am often quite pleased
with the results. Should a tonal curve adjustment be used instead to
handle high contrast images?