  (abridged) We identify 3 Kepler transiting planets, Kepler-7b, Kepler-12b,
and Kepler-41b, whose orbital phase-folded light curves are dominated by
planetary atmospheric processes including thermal emission and reflected light,
while the impact of non-atmospheric (i.e. gravitational) processes, including
beaming (Doppler boosting) and tidal ellipsoidal distortion, is negligible.
Therefore, those systems allow a direct view of their atmospheres without being
hampered by the approximations used in the inclusion of both atmospheric and
non-atmospheric processes when modeling the phase curve shape. Here we analyze
Kepler-12b and Kepler-41b atmosphere based on their Kepler phase curve, while
the analysis of Kepler-7b was presented elsewhere. The model we used
efficiently computes reflection and thermal emission contributions to the phase
curve, including inhomogeneous atmospheric reflection due to longitudinally
varying cloud coverage. We confirm Kepler-12b and Kepler-41b show a westward
phase shift between the brightest region on the planetary surface and the
substellar point, similar to Kepler-7b. We find that reflective clouds located
on the west side of the substellar point can explain the phase shift. The
existence of inhomogeneous atmospheric reflection in all 3 of our targets,
selected due to their atmosphere-dominated Kepler phase curve, suggests this
phenomenon is common. Therefore it is likely to be present also in planetary
phase curves that do not allow a direct view of the planetary atmosphere as
they contain additional orbital processes. We discuss the implications of a
bright-spot shift on the analysis of phase curves where both atmospheric and
gravitational processes appear. We also discuss the potential detection of
non-transiting but otherwise similar planets, whose mass is too small to show a
gravitational photometric signal but their atmospheric signal is detectable.
