Hi Geoff,
Heaven forbid Ansel Adams would have used anything less than 8 x 10 cut film and dodged and burned with his bare hands. I'm sure he would turn in his grave to watch our antics with digital imagery.
To answer your question; Yes, anything is possible, in a future time. Imagine all the processing power and flexibility of CS5 squeezed into your camera. There's no reason why not, although how you would control it is another matter. I doubt if you could rely on the camera to work it out for you automatically. I guess you would have to dial in a dynamic range which would be tricky because you would have to take light meter readings of everything in sight, calculate the range required and feed that in.
All this assumes the internal processing power of the little on-board computer is up to the task, and that the algorithm could be written to allow it. This would slow everything down of course, and we'd be back with the grumbles about shutter lag all over again.
Back in the early 70's some big-wig at Kodak announce that we faced a critical shortage of silver and, if something other than silver-metal halides were not developed for film emulsions soon, photography would be in trouble. If he could have looked forward 20 or so years and seen the almost total demise of silver based photography today he would have been astounded. Just imagine what may happen in the next 20 years
