Color Management ~ a recipe for RawTherapee

After having slogged through all that color management and "color science" madness I've settled on a simple, pleasing color processing recipe.

I use Open Source tools (RawTherapee and the Gimp) running on MintOS Linux, so the following might not directly apply to proprietary software nor RentWare processing applications running on Apple or Microsoft systems.  

Also, as I refer to the dcp color management file, many places refer to this as a "camera profile."  I'm just trying to be specific so that I don't confuse ICC-based color management systems with dcp-based software.

In RawTherapee -

1. Open RAW file
2. Let RawTherapee demosaic the image (which is will do for you before displaying an image)
   
3. Apply lens corrections
   
4. Capture Sharpen, if the ISO is low enough, otherwise apply an appropriate level of Noise Reduction
5. Apply a camera-specific dcp in Color Management
   
1. Select: "Tone Curve" (this one is particularly important for the rest of the process)
2. Select: "Look Table"
   
3. De-select: "Base Exposure" (this will make fewer Exposure modifications possible in the following step...)
   
6. Exposure slider to set the overall scene brightness (being careful to avoid clipping any of the channels)
7. Gentle adjustments of the Luminosity channel to fine tune contrast and brightness (again, being careful to avoid clipping any of the channels)

I'm not yet clear on if steps 5 and 6 should exchange places (see Update below).  It might be the case that stretching and changing the color space (exposure, brightness, contrast) changes how the dcp color map onto an image.  This is something I'm still considering, though I've not yet been able to confirm any difference where color management is applied (as step 5, or moved down as step 6 after the exposure is set).

For the way I've written the recipe, enabling "Tone Curve" in Color Management and disabling "Base Exposure" does the heavy lifting of setting a decent starting point for exposure.  The curve is embedded in some (many?) dcp files.  Of course, if you don't like the look of it you can disable it in Color Management and use the Luminosity channel exclusively.  De-selecting "Base Exposure" gets around RawTherapee's inability to match in-camera jpg tones.

Using "Standard", "Film Like", or "Perception" curves can modify colors are brightness and contrast are changed.  This is why "Luminosity" is so useful.  It changes brightness and leaves the dcp color alone.

If you don't already have a decent dcp, this person has a downloadable zip for RawTherapee that comes from the big RentWare provider.  I think these are beautiful and are much better than any of the dcp files I created.

 [Day +1 Update: I measured the colors in steps 5 and 6 and remeasured them when swapping the sequence of these steps.  There's a small difference in color.  So what I've taken to doing is running the process as written, then going back after steps 6 and 7 (when I'm done processing for exposure and contrast) to re-run step 5.  I do that by selecting "Camera Standard" and then selecting "Custom" where the dcp files are that I use.  This sets the colors to the processing levels I intend and avoids the small/minor color shifts that are introduced as the Luminosity channel Exposure and Contrast are manipulated.]