Hi
yes I believe IRIS does a similar thing, there is a Linear conversion box (ticked ) and the option to turn on or off colour balance. With Iris , nebulae seem to lack "punch" and outer detail, without burning in the brighter parts, but yes I do understand that Linear Conversion to pre bayer CFA monochrome images is the only way to accurately dark subtract astro images.What I wish was that I could restore the processed subtracted images to look exactly as they do if opened by the Canon software.
When processing a pic of Eta carina in Iris, the finished image is nice and free of dark current noise, but when I stretch the levels I seem to burn out the central parts while still not getting at all the outer faint detail. Images extracted from RAW with just the canon software show a lot more of this outer detail without burn in, I dont know why this is so. Perhaps Images Plus does a better job of the processing
Scott