I am working on adding in explosions to a space-themed shoot-em-up game I've been working on. I have generated the explosion animations using a free explosion generator, but have run into an issue. The smokey grey edges around all my explosion images stand out way to much because they are not transparent at all, as smoke should be. The only solution I have discovered so far is to manually edit out all the light colored pixels around the edges of the explosion, as seen on the left image in the attachment.
[attachment=19968:example.png]
This is a great deal of work to have to do for every animation frame, and since I plan on adding different explosions, this is quickly going to become ridiculous. Also, its taking away from the visual quality of the explosion. So, is there a way to blend the smokey edges around the explosions with the background? My understanding is its not as simple as just setting the alpha mode for the image, because that would blend the center of the explosion as well.
Hopefully I've explained my issue well enough. Thank you in advance for any suggestions.