I don't work in computer graphics, but I've always gone the other direction and been amused by the analogies of digital image processing to the physical ones.

I don't work in computer graphics, but I've always gone the other direction and been amused by the analogies of digital image processing to the physical ones. An example is the "contrast-adaptive sharpening" that AMD introduced a while back in their driver. I've been using contrast-adaptive sharpening for a long time in my film development. I use a developer (Agfa Rodinal, with many clones such as Compard R09) with a solvent effect that tends to increase edge sharpness. If you use it in high dilution without any agitation then highlights or sharp edges will tend to "locally deplete" the developer and reduce the rate of development. In combination with the edge-enhancing nature, this compensating effect tends to help reduce the haloing from the sharpening (and of course it also helps pull your highlights back a bit in general). Which is basically what contrast-adaptive sharpening does! And of course there's all those skeumorphic terms we've adopted that we no longer consciously think about the origins of. Dodging and burning, unsharp masks, and airbrushing are all real things that people used to do by hand!