Mostly Underexposed w/ Super Bright Highlights (snow)

My result: 

Brighter with fewer clipped pixels.

Allen, thanks for your example. I loaded yours and mine up in Photoshop and compared the Luminosity Histograms. Here's mine:

My image is brighter with 1/4 as many clipped pixels.

Here's Yours:

Yours is close to as bright as I wanted, but it has too many blown pixels for my taste - what I was trying to avoid.

As with VicC's example, yours does look pretty good, until I inspect it closer. It almost appears to me that you and Vic used similar approaches, but you took it a bit further, shifting everything farther to the right. VicC's image ended up too dark for my tastes, but he didn't have any clipped pixels. Your image ended up about as bright as I was hoping, but with too many blown pixels for my taste.

Thanks for your effort and example!

tex