Many RAW adjustments do have film/darkroom equivalents, at least in principle. Traditional processes could handle cropping, rotation, overall contrast changes, color manipulation, selective brightening/darkening, gradient effects, compositing, and retouching such as dust/spec removal or airbrushing. Local contrast and edge enhancement also existed in film workflows via photographic unsharp masking.

In black-and-white work, development choices could influence grain, contrast, and edge effects to some extent. So sharpening, local contrast, and even limited “noise” control were not purely digital inventions.

Where digital RAW editing clearly goes further is flexibility, precision, speed, and repeatability. A major example is color correction at multiple points in the tonal range: in a traditional color darkroom, global color balance was possible, but correcting different colors or tonal regions independently was difficult and often required complex masking. Digital tools make this routine.

So the overlap is larger than it first appears, but digital processing makes many operations easier, more localized, more reversible, and more controllable than film darkroom methods ever were.