One of the photo sites I hang out on is The Analog Photography Users Group (apug.org). This is a group of people who are dedicated to keeping film photography alive in the face of the digital onslaught. It does have its fair share of purists, who refuse to have anything to do with anything digital, including the hybrid workflow (scanning slides/negatives/prints into a computer and then working on the images in PhotoShop or some other image editing application). One can submit hybrid workflow images to the photo gallery on apug.org but they must be “straight prints.” No other digital manipulation is allowed.
The issue that I have is that almost every kind of manipulation one can do in PhotoShop can be done in a traditional darkroom. I created the image below in the late 1970’s, and what is featured here is a straight scan of the 1970’s print. The effects were done with a combination of solarization and bas-relief, on the print itself, in a traditional dark room. If I did the effects digitally, why would that make it any less valid?
My Third Eye 
In reference to your comment, John, several companies of interest worked years with artists and photographers to develope visual programs that would duplicate manual techniques. In most cases, they surpassed their expectations. The word “solarization” actually represents the darkroom process. The darkroom process has been imitated in effect only by digital media. The digital process is so different from the darkroom process that one could easily call it by another name such as “the high contrast border effect.” Hence, one cannot compare apples (film based media) to oranges (digitally based media). Ergo, digitally processed prints in this case are invalid.
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I guess I was referring to the final artistic effect, as opposed to whether it is the real thing. It does seem that just like in digital audio and video, in digital photography the language used to describe working with content borrows a lot from the analog process; in PhotoShop you can dodge, burn in etc., and even Unsharp Mask refers to an originally analog procedure.
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