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We present Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging data and Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) near-infrared ground-based images for the final sample of 56 candidate galaxy-scale lenses uncovered in the CFHT Legacy Survey as part of the Strong Lensing in the Legacy Survey project. The new images are used to perform lens modeling, measure surface photometry, and estimate stellar masses of the deflector early-type galaxies (ETGs). Lens modeling is performed on the HST images (or CFHT when HST is not available) by fitting the spatially extended light distribution of the lensed features assuming a singular isothermal ellipsoid mass profile and by reconstructing the intrinsic source light distribution on a pixelized grid. Based on the analysis of systematic uncertainties and comparison with inference based on different methods, we estimate that our Einstein radii are accurate to ∼3%. HST imaging provides a much higher success rate in confirming gravitational lenses and measuring their Einstein radii than CFHT imaging does. Lens modeling with ground-based images, however, when successful, yields Einstein radius measurements that are competitive with space-based images. Information from the lens models is used together with spectroscopic information from companion Paper IV to classify the systems, resulting in a final sample of 39 confirmed (grade A) lenses and 17 promising candidates (grade B,C). This represents an increase of half an order of magnitude in sample size with respect to the sample of confirmed lenses studied in Papers I and II. The Einstein radii of the confirmed lenses in our sample span the range 5–15 kpc and are typically larger than those of other surveys, probing the mass in regions where the dark matter contribution is more important. Stellar masses are in the range 1011–1012 M☉, covering the range of massive ETGs. The redshifts of the main deflector span a range 0.3 ⩽ zd ⩽ 0.8, which nicely complements low-redshift samples like the Sloan Lens ACS survey and thus provides an excellent sample for the study of the cosmic evolution of the mass distribution of ETGs over the second half of the history of the universe.
Sonnenfeld et al. (Fri,) studied this question.