I think you have some misunderstandings about Nuke's internal color processing, and some greater issues with

colorspaces themselves. Nuke linearizes every image you read in. When you read in a file, the "colorspac e" setting on the Read node is telling Nuke what to convert FROM to get the file 's data into linear light space, not what to convert it to. Inside of Nuke, all pixel operations are performed in the same linear space. How ever, since the vast majority of monitors in use today are calibrated or have a preset for displaying images in sRGB space, the linear data present in Nuke will LOOK incorrect in its raw form. The solution to this is the vLUT (Viewer Look-Up Table). This performs what is e ssentially an isolated conversion of the data in the viewer into whatever colors pace is selected. This is the dropdown you see in Nuke's viewer window that says 'sRGB' by default. The important thing to note here is that this is not actuall y changing the image at all, but essentially putting a "filter" between you and your image data so you can view it correctly. When you write a file out, you want to write it to the colorspace that will look correct. This is where the 'colorspace' knob on the Write node comes into play. To greatly simplify things, the most "common" image formats are written in sRGB space (JPEG, TIF, TGA, BMP, PNG). EXR files are most commonly written in linear space (a.k.a. 1.0 gamma), though they don't have to be. DPX files can be linear , sRGB, LOG, etc. So to summarize, the term "linear workflow" has nothing to do with the output fi le, and is really an outdated/unnecessary term in Nuke (since EVERYTHING is done in linear space). It's more important if you're dealing with programs that allo w you to work in various colorspaces (AE, Fusion), or if you're dealing with 3D lighting and rendering. When you write images out of Nuke, the colorspace you wr ite them to will almost certainly be determined by what format you're writing to and nothing else.

So basically when I import an EXR, I should keep the read file as linear(which i t is by default), and view it as sRGB(viewerprocess) to see how the final will l ook, and eventually export it using a file format that fits that sRGB format..?