masking a sprite

I have a flame sprite for my torches and braziers... but the dark edge shows a little too much. Is there a way to mask the texture that I apply to the sprite?

EDIT: Yes there is... Since I am using a PNG as my animated texture... I had the thing set like this:

Global flame = LoadAnimTexture("textures\flame.png",4,64,64,0,16)

When what I needed was to set it like this:

Global flame = LoadAnimTexture("textures\flame.png",2,64,64,0,16)

The number 4 after the image filename was for MASKED image... I make a B&W copy of the flame and tried to mask that but it just looked HORRIBLE!!!

So I changed it to 2 which tells the computer to make it ALPHA. MUCH BETTER!!! :)

I am still ignorant if I can use MASK and ALPHA together. No one has explained it to me!
prob solved...
-RZ
PS Any links to a better flame would be appreciated!

Hey dude, i did some functions for this kind of thing. Check it out here :

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=33427