View Element
An Element is typically any scene component, though in a practical sense, element refers to a contributing asset of some sort to the final composite of a shot. An element intended for compositing may be one of many different render passes or channels; a diffuse render, shadow-only render, normal render, and so on. The element within the composite can either be used as-is, or as a modifier to another element; an example would be using a grayscale diffuse layer to add shading to a color layer with no shading.