Designers of the modding community, help!

[redstonetorches]

How do you guys make your custom ship glows and cloak images? What programs do you use? For cloaks, I use gimp, and I use these steps. It produces a mediocre result;

• Open the ship image
  Layer -> Layer Size -> increase numbers by 20
  Image -> Fit Canvas to Layers
  Filter -> Edge Detect -> Laplace
  Press Shift-O for the Select by Colour tool
  Click a transparent bit of image
  Selection -> Invert
  Fill tool, set tool options to fill whole selection, fill selection with colour #f3f3f3
  Layer -> Duplicate Layer
  Page Down to select the lower layer
  Selection -> Grow -> 1 pixel
  Selection -> Feather -> 5 pixels
  Fill whole selection with colour #57c8fd
  Set lower layer opacity to 50%
  Export image as myship_cloak.png into your mod's img/ship directory

Any input is appreciated, thanks!

[mr_easy_money]

Layer -> Layer Size -> increase numbers by 20

don't increase the numbers by 20 and you should be fine. don't know why that's listed as a step as it just makes the cloak image unnecessarily large.

I use the exact same steps (other than that) and it ends up looking good enough for me.

EDIT: above the steps this is listed (these steps are taken from the old but gold ship building tutorial found below in my signature, Step 10), which probably explains why that step is in there, but I see no need for doing any of that:

"Importantly, you also need to expand it away from the border by 10px in each direction: so the cloak image should be 20px larger than the ship image in both x and y."