🚀 go-pugleaf

It's not that linear gamma is in any way a good thing, it's simply that the cameras count photons that way. Life would be a great deal easier if silicon sensors had the same compressive nonlinearity our eyes do (they'd have a much wider dynamic range quite apart from anything else), but alas, they don't.

That being the case, it's critical to do Exposure and white-balance adjustments on the linear data, and useful to do rough midtone and contrast adjustments on the linear data. There's no particular reason to do sharpening on the linear data other than as a workflow convenience. I never use global sharpening so I do all my sharpening on the gamma-corrected data in Photoshop.

All ACR's previews are gamma-corrected. Otherwise you'd be looking at a lot of almost-black images.

Note that while scanners are also linear devices, they're scanning film, which responds to light much more like our eyeballs do, so the the arguments that apply to digital raw captures do not apply to film scans (or to camera-produced JPEGs, which are already converted to a gamma-corrected space).

Timo is still wrong, our senses still have profound compressive nonlinearities, and there's still no real benefit to linear gamma. It's simply a case of making lemonade when handed a lemon.