Photo-editing A-Z

L

• Lab mode (1)Lab mode is a color mode used occasionally in specific circumstances in photo editing software. Digital images are usually in the RGB (red, green, blue channel) color mode, but in Lab mode they are separated into a Luminance (L) channel and two color (a, b) channels.
• Lasso tool (1)A simple freehand tool for selecting parts of a photo. You drag the lasso pointer around the object or area you want to select and it's enclosed by a 'marching ants' outline. Freehand selections are quick but inaccurate – it depends on how good your mouse control is!
• Layers (6)Layers 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 blur (1)A new feature in Adobe Lightroom that uses AI to identify key subjects and three-dimensional depth in photos. It can be used to isolate the subject and blur the background both much more quickly than conventional techniques and rather more convincingly too.
• Lens corrections (12)No 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.
• Levels (7)Levels 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.
• Library (1)In Lightroom, the Library is where image organisation and browsing is carried out. Capture One also has a Library panel for this kind of large-scale organising and searching.
• Light leak (4)Old 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.
• Lightness (1)One of the three adjustments you get in HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) mode and a different way of making colour adjustments that's often more effective, especially for adjusting specific colors or color ranges anyway. The Lightness value simply changes the brightness of the selected color or the whole image.
• Lightroom (Adobe) (22)The '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 Classic (Adobe) (27)Lightroom 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 mobile (1)An app for iOS or Android devices which works alongside the desktop Lightroom app to display images you’ve synchronised via Creative Cloud. When you 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.
• Linear DNG (7)A Linear DNG is a special type of raw file where the raw data has been 'demosaiced', which is the first stage of raw processing, and otherwise modified, but can still be edited and manipulated like a regular raw file afterwards. It's a way to apply specialized lens corrections or denoising, for example, without losing that raw 'edibility'.
• Linear mask (2)Sometimes 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.
• Local adjustments (7)Adjustments 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.
• Lossy/lossless compression (2)Digital images are usually compressed in some way to produce smaller and more manageable files, and this compression comes in two types. Lossy compression is the most aggressive and does involve the loss of some image detail, though this is rarely visible. It's used for JPEG images and some RAW files. Lossless compression simple takes up the 'spare space' in the image file and doesn't discard any data, but the reductions in file size are smaller. TIFF files use lossless compression, as do some RAW file formats.
• Luminance mask (2)A Linear DNG is a special type of raw file where the raw data has been 'demosaiced', which is the first stage of raw processing, and otherwise modified, but can still be edited and manipulated like a regular raw file afterwards. It's a way to apply specialized lens corrections or denoising, for example, without losing that raw 'edibility'.
• Luminance noise (1)The 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’.
• Luminar (Skylum) (1)Luminar is a comparatively new image-editing program that offers instant effects presets made with a range of different filters and tools which you can combine and adjust manually. Luminar 4 introduces increased AI technologies for sky replacement and augmented reality effects. Luminar Neo is the latest version.
• LUTs (15)LUT 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.