What does the 'L' mean when someone is explaining code?

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Every time I look up a question that displays example code on here or Git I usually see the letter L listed in the explanation. For example the code below for finding the average brightness of an image. (I'm trying to find average brightness of a set of images in a user-specified directory and this is where I was starting.)

I have tried to research it however every time I look it up it comes up with seemingly irrelevant explanations. I want to state that the code I'm showing is NOT MINE and I will link the original user below

import sys
from PIL import Image


def calculate_brightness(image):
    greyscale_image = image.convert('L')  # THIS IS THE 'L' 
    histogram = greyscale_image.histogram()
    pixels = sum(histogram)
    brightness = scale = len(histogram)

    for index in range(0, scale):
        ratio = histogram[index] / pixels
        brightness += ratio * (-scale + index)

    return 1 if brightness == 255 else brightness / scale


if __name__ == '__main__':
    for file in sys.argv[1:]:
        image = Image.open(file)
        print("%s\t%s" % (file, calculate_brightness(image)))

The link for the original user and their code is: https://gist.github.com/kmohrf/8d4653536aaa88965a69a06b81bcb022

python-imaging-library python-3.x syntax python
1 Answers

From the docs for PIL:

The default method of converting a greyscale (“L”)

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