0.039, so yes but I do recommend you to work in nuke if you are dealing with linear files, photoshop is pretty bad at this. Also remember that if you are outputing to an 8 bit file, your 0.04 will have srgb gamma baked in. So if you want to use linear values make sure you output to linear .exr or to compensate the gamma…
This is not correct. a value of 10,10,10 will be 10,10,10 regardless of if your target is sRGB (gamma space) or linear space. There is absolutely no need to use over 8 bit per channel or EXR format. Normal maps require linear space and have used 8 bit file formats for ages. If this were true, it would be impossible to work…