well... please bear me with me a bit more as I am trying to make my way in this field.
From my little understanding, yeah you are completely right and this how I would imagine color management workflow is going.
but on the other hand what confuses me more is the piece of software I am trying to use right now.
So let's forget about whatever studio for now and focus only on the process of "raw image conversion" & "profile assignment".
basically, I have
Libraw/DCraw and
LittleCMS as a separate and "complementary" software to create a functional color management workflow.
Libraw/DCraw is responsible only for raw image conversion, it doesn't support ICC profile application except for the default hard-coded spaces (e.g. sRGB, Adobe RGB, XYZ, Wide, PhotoPro, ACES) [
https://imgur.com/a/wpfo7rW]
LittleCMS, on the other hand, is responsible only for ICC profile application/assignment to an image which
cannot be raw.
which means basically, if I want to correct for my images I need first to go through
Libraw/DCraw and convert my raw image into a non-raw format (e.g. tiff) and I need to specify an output color space as well (usually I go with raw), and just then I can apply my custom ICC profile using LittleCMS.
so by converting to a tiff and having the output color space specified as "raw" am assuming that no alteration to the data has had happened and assigning an ICC profile afterwards would be just fine?
(to be honest I am not even sure what does
Libraw/DCraw mean by raw or XYZ during the conversion process, mapping the numbers to XYZ gamut? what then for raw, monitor gamut?)