

To make glows for lasers:

1.  Import laser sprite into gimp.

2.  Place it on a black background with plent of room around.

3.  Flatten a copy onto the black background (keep the transparent original
    as a separate layer).

4.  Blur the backgrounded version with Gaussian Blur, 2.0 radius, and IIR
    for Filter Type (very important not to use Auto).

5.  Select all black area around the blurred version, and crop all layers to the
    non-black region.

6.  Save cropped black region as glow sprite.

7.  Shrink canvas size in centered manner to contain just the sprite itself,
    and then save that as the sprite (to make sure centering on sprite and
	glow are identical... there may be some extra pixels on one end of the
	sprite).
