[StargateSpankyHam]

How do I turn an image such as this:

...into a shield icon?

Obviously, desaturate, adjust brightness and contrast until it looks good, but what about the solid black background? I could hand-draw the shield regions for the ships, and I know that the ship and the four shield regions make up five individual ANI frames (easy enough to split them into different layers, screenshot, paste, and save), but what do I do to get rid of the solid black background? I know it has to do with the alpha map, which controls the transparency.

More importantly, how to I turn this high-rez image into a low-rez one? What is the size of the .ani I need to end up with? I'll obviously need to scale it so that it is just a little bit smaller than the size of the ANI, to draw the shield regions. Also, in drawing the shield regions, is there an easy way to make them perfectly symmetrical, in the case of a symmetrical ship such as this?

[Cyborg17]

For the background, use the set color to alpha in GIMP.  It should be in layers->Transparency.  I don't know what the photoshop equivalent is.  Btw, who made the ship, it looks awesome!

EDIT: Also, for the shield icons being reflected, try copy, paste, and flip tool.

[mjn.mixael]

The easiest thing to do would be to open one of the shield icons from retail and see how they look. (I'm pretty sure you don't need to worry about transparency though).

Match your five frames to five frames from the retail example, then you can use this to easily make the right kind of .ani file.