The Creator Of Some Of Instagram's Best Filters Just Launched His Own Photo App
Litely lets you add gorgeous film-inspired filters to your photos that are more subtle than the ones that you would find on Instagram or other editing apps.
The app's creator, Cole Rise, is a long-time photographer, designer, and entrepreneur. He started his first web design company at 16 and, several startups later, Apple bought his HTML5 design company, Particle, in 2012. His photos have appeared in several magazines, including National Geographic.
He also helped design some of Instagram's most beautiful filters: Amaro, Hudson, Sierra, Sutro, Mayfair, Willow, and the aptly named Rise. He was one of the app's beta users - its 75th Instagrammer, to be exact - and he also worked on the company's app icon.
He told Business Insider that he's a photo nerd at heart and decided to create Litely because he wanted a quick, easy way to edit photos from his phone without having to bounce back and forth among his other favorite photo apps. Rise designed the filters that you can use on Litely to be subtle, because he always found that he was dialing back the effects that he would use on other apps to about 25%.
"Phone cameras are replacing the family camera," Rise says. "These are our memories. These are the stories that we are going to tell later. You don't want them to be overly edited."
Litely lets you zoom in on certain parts of a photo, edit panoramas, and is extremely straightforward to use. It's free to download, but users can pay to have access to more filter packages. Right now Rise is more or less a one-man team, but he said that he'd love to have an Android version of Litely by the end of the year.
He doesn't see Litely competing with Instagram, which has the benefit of a huge, active community, but more as an addition: You can make your photos perfect in Litely before uploading them into Instagram.
Here are some of the gorgeous photos that Rise posted to Instagram after editing them in Litely:
You can find more of Rise's amazing photography on his website.