Yes. Writing a post like this, but for film, would be illustrative of that similarity, but significantly more challenging to represent, especially for color film. I actually don't know the whole process in enough detail to write one, and the visualizations would be difficult, but the processing is there.

You have layers of substrate with silver halides, made sensitive to different frequency ranges with sensitizing dyes, crystallized into silver halide crystals, rather than a regular grid of pixels; you take a photo that is not an image, but a collection of specks of metallic silver. Through a series of chemical reactions, you develop those specks. Differences in chemistry, in temperatures, in agitation, in the film, all affect what for digital images is described as processing. Then in printing, you have a similar process all over again.

If anything, one might argue that the digital process allows a more consistent and quantitative understanding of the actual processing being done. Analog film seems like it involves less processing only because, for most people, the processing was always a black box of sending off the film for development and printing.

Exactly - film photographers heavily process(ed) their images from the film processing through to the print. Ansel Adams wrote a few books on the topic and they’re great reads.

And different films and photo papers can have totally different looks, defined by the chemistry of the manufacturer and however _they_ want things to look.

Excepting slide photos. No real adjustment once taken (a more difficult medium than negative film which you can adjust a little when printing)

You’re right about Ansel Adams. He “dodged and burned” extensively (lightened and darkened areas when printing.) Photoshop kept the dodge and burn names on some tools for a while.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IoCtni-WWVs

When we printed for our college paper we had a dial that could adjust the printed contrast a bit of our black and white “multigrade” paper (it added red light). People would mess with the processing to get different results too (cold/ sepia toned). It was hard to get exactly what you wanted and I kind of see why digital took over.

>Excepting slide photos. No real adjustment once taken (a more difficult medium than negative film which you can adjust a little when printing)

One might argue that there, many of the processing choices are being made by the film manufacturer, in the sensitizing dyes being used, etc.

I found one way to "adjust" slide photos: I accidentally processed a (color) roll of mine using C-41. The result was surprisingly not terrible.

A school photography company I worked for used a custom Kodak stock. They were unsatisfied with how Kodak's standard portrait film handled darker skin tones.

They were super careful to maintain the look across the transition from film to digital capture. Families display multiple years of school photos next to each other and they wanted a consistent look.

True, but there may be different intentions behind the processing.

Sometimes the processing has only the goal to compensate the defects of the image sensor and of the optical elements, in order to obtain the most accurate information about the light originally coming from the scene.

Other times the goal of the processing is just to obtain an image that appears best to the photographer, for some reason.

For casual photographers, the latter goal is typical, but in scientific or technical applications the former goal is frequently encountered.

Ideally, a "raw" image format is one where the differences between it and the original image are well characterized and there are no additional unknown image changes done for an "artistic" effect, in order to allow further processing when having either one of the previously enumerated goals.