Life after Photoshop’s Photo-editing A-Z

L

• Lab modeA color model which splits colors into a luminance (L) channel and two a and b color channels. It's used very occasionally in photography for certain editing tasks where the separation of brightness values from color information is useful.
• Laowa 9mm f2.8
• Lasso toolA simple selection tool where you drag an outline around the object or area you want to select. The selection is ‘closed’ and ready for use when you finish the loop back at the point where you started. The Lasso tool is not very accurate but when used in conjunction with other selection tools and editing processes it can nevertheless be very effective.
• Lateral chromatic aberrationA common lens aberration that produces color fringes around the edges of objects, and an effect that gets stronger towards the edges of the frame. It happens with lenses that can't focus different wavelengths of light (colors) at precisely the same point. These days it can be corrected quite easily in-camera or with software later.
• LayersLayers come in a couple of different types. There are the image layers used for image montages, but there are also adjustment and/or effects layers used to change the appearance of a photo rather than combining it with another one.
• Lens correctionsNo lens is perfect. All lenses display aberrations to some degree, including distortion, chromatic aberration (colour fringing) and vignetting (corner shading). An increasing number of programs  now offer automatic lens corrections which can identify the lens used to take a shot and apply a specially-calibrated correction profile from that lens.
• Lens profileAlmost all lenses suffer from aberrations, including distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting. These are difficult to eliminate optically in the lens design, so software publishers are increasingly offering lens correction profiles to do this digitally. The software can identify the lens used from the image’s EXIF data and then find and apply the correct profile automatically.
• LevelsLevels adjustments are one of the most basic yet most important things you can do when enhancing photos. It's a quick and simply way to maximise contrast and tonal without clipping (cutting off) any details in the extreme shadows and highlights.
• Light leakOld and cheap film cameras have poor seals and badly-fitting backs that may let light through on to the film inside. This produces pale streaks across the image or at the edges and has become associated with an ‘old camera’ look. Some programs now replicate light leaks digitally in a variety of colours, patterns and orientations.
• LightroomLightroom is an all-in-one photo cataloguing, organising and editing tool that also synchronised with a mobile app so that you can browse and share your images while you’re on the move. It uses the same RAW conversion engine and tools as Adobe Camera Raw, which comes with Photoshop, but comes in two versions: Lightroom Classic CC uses the same desktop-based storage system and tools as the 'old' Lightroom, while Lightroom CC is a new stripped-down version with a simpler interface which uses paid-for cloud storage.
• Lightroom CCThe 'web first' version of Lightroom. It's a streamlined version of the original Lightroom Classic software and stores your images online in 'the cloud' so that they are available to all your devices everywhere. The extra storage needed does bring extra subscription costs.
• Lightroom MobileAn app for iOS or Android devices which works alongside the desktop Lightroom app to display images you’ve synchronised via Creative Cloud. When sync a Collection in the desktop app, that Collection and its images will appear in Lightroom Mobile. You can view and even edit images in Lightroom Mobile and your changes will be synchronised with the desktop version.
• Lightroom web
• LightsThe does not refer to 'lights' as in 'lighting', but 'lights' as in tonal adjustments to images. Most photographers are used to talking about 'shadows', 'midtones' and 'highlights', but Adobe's tone curve adjustments split image tones into four quadrants not three – 'shadows', 'darks', 'lights' and 'highlights'. In this context, 'lights' can be thought of as 'bright midtones'.
• Linear gradientSometimes used as just another term for 'linear mask', it offers a straight-line transition from an adjusted area to unadjusted. It’s usually a soft transition not a hard one, and you can vary the width of the transition zone. Linear masks are used most often for darkening skies in landscape shots, where they are like the digital equivalent of a graduated filter. A linear gradient can also be a painting tool for applying gradients (not adjustments) to images.
• Linear maskA linear mask offers a straight-line transition from an adjusted area to unadjusted. It's usually a soft transition not a hard one, and you can vary the width of the transition zone. Linear masks are used most often for darkening skies in landscape shots, where they are like the digital equivalent of a graduated filter.
• LiquifyA Photoshop mode for bending, pinching and distorting areas of an image to create a special effect or ‘improve’ the body shape of a subject. Other applications like Affinity Photo offer similar tools.
• Loawa 9mm f/2.8
• Local adjustmentsAdjustments made only to specific areas in a photo, not the whole picture. You pick out the areas you want to adjust with selections, masks or brush tools.
• Localised contrastA relatively new type of image adjustment that splits a photo up into different areas, depending on its properties, and applies an optimum contrast adjustment to each. It’s used for a variety of ‘dehaze’ and similar tools. It’s also used as a kind of super-coarse sharpening which doesn’t make the edges of objects crisper in the normal way, but works over a much wider radius to give images more visual ‘punch’ from normal viewing distances.
• LoupeIn traditional film photography, this is a small magnifying eyepiece for examining the detail in a negative, slide or print. In digital imaging it’s a magnifying view for use on-screen. Aperture and Capture One use a digital representation of a loupe, while Lightroom has a Loupe view where you can zoom in and out.
• Low keyA photo where most of the tones are dark, such as a black cat in a coal cellar. You can also give photos a low key look with slight underexposure. It gives photos a dramatic, moody look, though the subject matter has to be right for this to work properly.
• Luma curveMost curves adjustments in photo editing are carried out on the image's RGB channels, either all together (to maintain the same color balance) or individually (to produce color shifts). RGB curve adjustments, however, produce changes to image saturation at the same time. Luma curve adjustments do not. Here, only the luma (luminance) values are altered, not the color values. As a result, with luma curve adjustments only the contrast is changed, not the saturation.
• Luminance (contrast) noiseThe chief component in image noise and the one that’s most difficult to remove because software can’t easily distinguish between random image noise and real image detail. The result is that the more noise reduction you apply, the more you tend to lose fine image detail, resulting in images with obvious and objectionable ‘smoothing’.
• LuminarLuminar is a comparatively new image-editing software that offers instant effects presets made with a range of different filters and tools which you can combine and adjust manually. It offers easily-customised ‘workspaces’ which contain only the tools you need and which makes the interface as straightforward as possible.
• LUT (lookup table)LUT stands for ‘lookup table’. Essentially, it takes the colours in an image and remaps them on to new ones. It really is a table consisting of a large grid of colour swatches and how they should be adjusted in the converted images. Its closest equivalent is the device profiles used in colour management systems, which work on a similar principle, but LUTs are usually designed for creative effects rather than colour correction.
• Lutify.me
• LUTsLUT is short for Look Up Table. It's a kind of conversion profile that 'remaps' the luminance and colour values in an image on to new values. LUTs are widely used in cinematography to create a certain 'look' and they have now captured the attention of software publishers.