This is something I wanted to ask “anonymous” about. Sometimes it seems he meant that never, ever, ever should one edit non-linearly-encoded RGB, and never, ever, ever should one perform any edits that aren’t the sort of edits that preserve scene-referred ratios, or at least allow to recover scene-referred ratios, such as linear to log, reversible to recover the intensities. But this doesn’t seem like a reasonable way to edit when the goal is a final “pretty” rather than “scene-referred” image that will be displayed as a print or on a monitor.
But sometimes it seemed that all that was meant, was that the original scene-referred image file is untouched, and transforms are done on copies of the original image, linked by nodes, entirely reversible at will. But this interpretation also doesn’t seem consistent with the emphasis given to keeping everything scene-referred.
Or maybe what was meant was that the original footage/images is untouched apart from scene-referred edits to bring the footage/images in line with other footage/images that will be combined in the final production. And then all the “make it pretty” edits are done on the “now consistent across sources” footage/images, again using nodes and also LUTS and whatever else one might do to produce a final “pretty” version suitable for display. Which might then be further modified on a per output device basis.