Oxymoron? NLP is about automating the conversion. Automation needs some guidance, it cannot (yet) read your mind for what the results should be, and this is something like “brightest light = 255, 255, 255” and “darkest shadows = 0,0,0”…
Deviating from these guides can be set by the clipping parameters, at least to a certain degree.
Leaving the brightest and darkest parts where they are (in the histogram) should be possible in general, whether the tools @nate uses in NLP can actually do it remains to be seen. One difficulty could be the non-linearity of the film’s colour characteristics that also vary from colour to colour.
We could also get a database filled with characteristics by stock, developed as prescribed. If development only varied a little, the values would be debatable, but still remain ballpark-ish. Lots of ifs to handle in software! And maybe more people could get happier with such a feature.