How can I set the opacity or transparency of a Pan

Question

I was wondering how to change or modify the transparency of a Panel in C#, not the whole form, but the panel only.. I've seen many C# tutorials on Opacity, but its for the Form. im looking for how it could be possible with the Panel only. Thank You!

Answer 1

This does work for me. In below example, Alpha range can be a value between 0 to 255. Previously, I made a mistake by thinking that it must be a value of percentage.

Dim x as integer = 230 Panel1.BackColor = Color.FromArgb(x, Color.Blue)

Answer 2

Try this:

panel1.BackColor = Color.FromArgb(100, 88, 44, 55);

change alpha(A) to get desired opacity.

Answer 3

Don't forget to bring your Panel to the Front when dynamically creating it in the form constructor. Example of transparent panel overlay of tab control.

panel1 = new TransparentPanel();
panel1.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Transparent;
panel1.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(0, 0);
panel1.Name = "panel1";
panel1.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(717, 92);
panel1.TabIndex = 0;
tab2.Controls.Add(panel1);
panel1.BringToFront(); 

// <== otherwise the other controls paint over top of the transparent panel

Answer 4

Yes, opacity can only work on top-level windows. It uses a hardware feature of the video adapter, that doesn't support child windows, like Panel. The only top-level Control derived class in Winforms is Form.

Several of the 'pure' Winform controls, the ones that do their own painting instead of letting a native Windows control do the job, do however support a transparent BackColor. Panel is one of them. It uses a trick, it asks the Parent to draw itself to produce the background pixels. One side-effect of this trick is that overlapping controls doesn't work, you only see the parent pixels, not the overlapped controls.

This sample form shows it at work:

public partial class Form1 : Form {
    public Form1() {
        InitializeComponent();
        this.BackColor = Color.White;
        panel1.BackColor = Color.FromArgb(25, Color.Black);
    }
    protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e) {
        e.Graphics.DrawLine(Pens.Yellow, 0, 0, 100, 100);
    }
}

If that's not good enough then you need to consider stacking forms on top of each other. Like this.

Notable perhaps is that this restriction is lifted in Windows 8. It no longer uses the video adapter overlay feature and DWM (aka Aero) cannot be turned off anymore. Which makes opacity/transparency on child windows easy to implement. Relying on this is of course future-music for a while to come. Windows 7 will be the next XP :)

Answer 5

As far as I know a Panel can have a transparent color only, you can not control the opacity of the panel. So, you can have some parts of a panel completely transparent but not a 50% to say something.

To use transparency you must define the transparent color property.

Answer 6

Based on information found at http://www.windows-tech.info/3/53ee08e46d9cb138.php, I was able to achieve a translucent panel control using the following code.

public class TransparentPanel : Panel
{
    protected override CreateParams CreateParams
    {
        get
        {
            CreateParams cp = base.CreateParams;
            cp.ExStyle |= 0x00000020; // WS_EX_TRANSPARENT
            return cp;
        }
    }

    protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e)
    {
        e.Graphics.FillRectangle(new SolidBrush(this.BackColor), this.ClientRectangle);
    }
}

The caveat is that any controls that are added to the panel have an opaque background. Nonetheless, the translucent panel was useful for me to block off parts of my WinForms application so that users focus was shifted to the appropriate area of the application.