We examine the impact of using photometric redshifts for studying the evolution of both the global galaxy luminosity function (LF) and that for different galaxy types. To this end, we compare the LFs obtained using photometric redshifts from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) D1 field with those from the spectroscopic survey VIMOS VLT Deep Survey (VVDS) comprising ≈4800 galaxies. We find that for z ≤ 2.0, in the interval of magnitudes considered by this survey, the LFs obtained using photometric and spectroscopic redshifts show a remarkable agreement. This good agreement led us to use all four Deep fields of the CFHTLS comprising ≈386,000 galaxies to compute the LF of the combined fields and directly estimate the error in the parameters based on the field-to-field variation. We find that the characteristic absolute magnitude M* of Schechter fits fades by ≈0.7 mag from z ≈ 1.8 to z ≈ 0.3, while the characteristic density * increases by a factor of ≈4 in the same redshift interval. We use the galaxy classification provided by the template fitting program used to compute photometric redshifts and split the sample into galaxy types. We find that these Schechter parameters evolve differently for each galaxy type, an indication that their evolution is a combination of several effects: galaxy merging, star formation quenching, and mass assembly. All these results are compatible with those obtained by different spectroscopic surveys such as VVDS, DEEP2, and zCosmos, which reinforces the fact that photometric redshifts can be used to study galaxy evolution, at least for the redshift bins adopted so far. This is of great interest since future very large imaging surveys containing hundreds of millions of galaxies will allow us to obtain important precise measurements to constrain the evolution of the LF and to explore the dependence of this evolution on morphology and/or color helping constrain the mechanisms of galaxy evolution.
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