I am writing a 2D 16 bpp arcade game, It uses the allegro graphics lib. I have certain sprites (explosions, glows) which are drawn against a black background, when I blit these against a different background the sprite''s edges do not blend with the background and the sprite looks bad, I am not talking about anti-aliasing here, I am talking about reading rgb of source pixel and combining it with rgb of destination pixel to make it look natural (the way it has been drawn against black background). for achieving this I got some helpful code from chris''s page which did alpha and additive blending, the problem is if I additively blend my sprite with background it looks fine against dark backgrounds but looks totally bright against bright backgrounds.the problem with alpha blending is that it completely kills intensity of colors. equation for additive blending is r3=r1+r2; if (r3>255) r3=255; equation for alpha blending is alpha=(2*r1+3*g1+b1)/6; r3=((r1*alpha)+(r2*(255-alpha)))/256; equation for screen blending is r3 = r1 + r2 - ((r1*r2) / 100); where r1 is sprite color, r2 is background color, r3 is result (blended) color. The right way to do this was while drawing the image to use a additional alpha channel which controlled the transparency per pixel and to save this image in a format which supported transparency like tga. but due to lack of vision all graphics have been drawn and saved as windows bitmap files. Now I cant seem to blend them right with the backgrounds. my test program will make it clear, please download it from http://www.geocities.com/lazy_coder/code/all.zip (350k) or if you have allegro for msvc installed http://www.geocities.com/lazy_coder/code/src.zip (70k) the page is http://www.geocities.com/lazy_coder/index.htm if you can help me I will be most obliged and will give full credit. Please try to mail me directly as I am not subscribed to the mailing list. Deepak T (coolbool@gmx.net)