For tone equalzer, I often use a very heavily blurred mask. The strength of that module is to manipulate regions, not individual pixels, which is very important when you compress the dynamic range, in order to avoid losing local contrast.
For a recent example, you can check out this post from me (note that it uses the in-development agx tone mapper, so it won’t work perfectly on the released version of damage; simply enable filmic rgb or sigmoid, instead).