Sprites too bright

Newbie alert!
When I load a sprite with the Color flag enabled it appears much brighter than the original image, when I use the Alpha flag it appears much darker and is too transparent for my purpose. With the Masked flag the color and brightness are just fine but there is an ugly black margin around the sprite... can anybody tell me how to make my sprite look like the bloody image it was loaded from? :)

Just darken it in Paintshop or something and then load it. That should do it most of the time.

you may have your gamma settings wrong? check your driver settings :/

My driver settings are ok...
Isn't there another method than the Photoshop one? It doesn't work very well because in order to have the sprite look like the original image as to its brightness I have to make it so dark that it loses part of its color and appears pale. Is this normal?

Does EntityColor affect sprites? Try 128,128,128 and work from there.

What file format are you using? (There was a bug in photoshop 6.0 that output .png files at the wrong gamma.) That has been fixed since the 6.01 update, Probably not your problem, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

maybe if you could upload the image somewhere we could look at it and see better what the problem might be.