I'd suggest using post effects for explosions, just put a coloured light in right spot and a small coloured sphere to note centre

Lots of brushes/PNGs for fire/explosions and best of all if you cna afford it is PARTICLE ILLUSION ;)

though oddly one of my fave SFX plugins for Photoshop went wonky when I installed in my new PC :(

Ulead GIF X 2 is awesome for lightning, lens flares etc, get weird "cannot find anigif2.dll" error even when I know that dll is in right spot or even copied it to WIndows/system32 etc grrrrrr

 

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