Brightening shadows darkens highlights

Download DNG.
Check out the attached file and try to play with the Shadows slider. To me, it behaves somewhat unintuitively: instead of just affecting shadows, increasing the shadows also darkens the snow and vice versa — decreasing the shadows value brightens the snow.
Is it a bug or expected behaviour?
The long(er) story
I got this photo of my daughter skiing... under some very flat light and was trying to get some contrast: overall and especially in the snow.
First, I went what seemed the intuitive route: boosted Contrast to the max, along with setting the white and black points, then brought down highlights and lifted shadows. (That is snapshot "1-Normal" in the original). It looked fine, but I thought I'd try to get more definition in the snow.
So, I went on and realized that I have to stretch the highlights with -Exposure and +Whites (snapshots 2 and 3 in the original). The problem is, that under these condition, the Shadows slider starts to not behave itself, as described above.
Also, check out the faint large black halos and small white halos around the objects (flags and my daughter).
Both of these problems get worse the further you push the Exposure and White sliders aside in their respective directions.

Hi Dorin,
I have downloaded your DNG. To notice the halos you mention I had to go for 2:1 magnification. At 1:1 I did not see them at first, now with the knowledge where to look I can detect them.
The shadow slider seems to do an overall compression or expansion of the whole histogram, at least once -highlights are maximized and -exposure considerably. Not so much discernible on your snapshot 1-Normal.
I knew that shadows affects all regions, not just its own, but was not aware of the "opposite or compressing direction" before you pointed it out.
(My test samples have not been of such a nature yet to go for extreme settings.)
I guess your best expert so far could be Rob Cole, at least he is the one who has shared in most thorough detail what his develop experiences are.
He gruntled a lot at first about *unintuitivity*, but learned to like the results.
I looked in his current thread http://forums.adobe.com/thread/968940?tstart=0, but there he does not (yet?) give details to the behaviour of the shadow-slider alone.
He has observed new halos as well, hopefully Eric Chan might be looking at it.
There may be more info in this thread http://forums.adobe.com/thread/956844?tstart=30, but it is so polluted with insults that Dave Merchant mercifully locked it.
If the shadow slider would behave as you and I would *intuitively* expect, we might run into another problem: if the snow would also get brightened i.o. darkened by lifting shadows, there might not be enough headroom left to counteract with the other sliders (-whites -highlights) ?
So I see some merit in what I can observe in your example.
Bug or Feature?
Cornelia

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