Ok... I've had a good play with this one and I've managed to come up with an almost transparent lens flare by pulling some tricks...

The FLA, PSD and PNG files are here

I think the result looks pretty good... The lens flare might be a little too big, but you can tweak the size and the look with the included PSD (obviously it's always better to make the original image as small as possible outside of Flash).

Here's how the lens flare was done... Make a new layer and fill it with black (or whatever colour will be dominant in your Flash file). Create your desired lens flare effect - preferably centered so that it's as circular as possible. Underneath this layer, create another layer and fill it with a different colour, like green or blue. Back on your top layer, select 'Screen' from the blend mode drop down. The lens flare now seems transparent, but it's not over yet... Disable or remove the coloured layer you made below and you'll see that the lens flare has a black background again. Create a vector mask on your lens flare layer. Choose the gradient tool and select the 'radial' gradient type. Now create a gradient from the center of the lens flare large enough to hide the black outside of the lens flare itself. You'll now have a lens flare with a slight black gradiented edge, but in your Flash movie you'll barely be able to see the black as it's a dominant background colour.

Phew... right. Locking layers: You can actually lock/hide all layers at once by clicking on the eye/padlock itself at the top of the layers list. You can then unhide just the layer you're working on, if you're working on a fiddly flash movie.

Flash is actually pretty clever with images now too... Once something is in the library as a symbol, image or sound, you can re-use it as many times as you like without having to download it again. To get something out of the library, simply drag either the item's name or it's image (as displayed in the library) to the stage.

As for all this help... don't worry about it. It's in the interests of both of us! You because obviously you want to learn Flash and me because it helps the forums... both in terms of helping you (and therefore you coming back and recommending the site to others) but also in the search engines as everything we post drives more traffic to the site. Threads like this are gold dust in the search engines with all these perfectly on topic keywords. If someone searches for transparent lens flare, they'll probably get this page in the near future, especially now I've used the phrase directly again :wink:.