I'm developing a UI system that has all those smart features like panel tearing off and docking, etc. Right now my task is to create an overlay on the screen that shows the position where the teared off or dockable panel would land. Pretty much same thing that visual studio has got.
For that I'm using a custom layered window class that would show up when it is needed. After that I've started digging to achieve the needed effect.
I was working with standart GDI functions before and basicly they are ok. But this time I followed the documentation advice to use UpdateLayeredWindow for my tasks and to load 32bit image from bitmap instead of drawing it with GDI functions.
So here I have a 128x128pixel wide bmp with 222 in alpha channel and 255 0 0 in RGB
Here are methods which I use for initialization and drawing.
void Init(HDC in_hdc,HWND in_hwnd)
{
bf = { 0, 0, 200, AC_SRC_ALPHA };
hwnd = in_hwnd;
hdc_mem = CreateCompatibleDC(in_hdc);
hBitmap_mem = CreateCompatibleBitmap(in_hdc, canvas_size.cx, canvas_size.cy);
hBitmap_mem_default = (HBITMAP)SelectObject(hdc_mem, hBitmap_mem);
hdc_bitmap = CreateCompatibleDC(in_hdc);
}
void DrawArea(RECT& in_rect)
{
hBitmap_area_default = (HBITMAP)SelectObject(hdc_bitmap, hBitmap_area);
AlphaBlend(hdc_mem, in_rect.left, in_rect.top, in_rect.right, in_rect.bottom, hdc_bitmap, 0, 0, 2, 2, bf);
hBitmap_area = (HBITMAP)SelectObject(hdc_bitmap, hBitmap_area_default);
}
void Update()
{
POINT p = { 0, 0 };
HDC hdc_screen = GetDC(0);
UpdateLayeredWindow(hwnd, hdc_screen, &p, &canvas_size, hdc_mem, &p, 0, &bf, ULW_ALPHA);
}
The window style has this extras
WS_EX_LAYERED|WS_EX_TRANSPARENT|WS_EX_TOPMOST
And here is what I get.
So as you can see the blending that takes place DOES take into account per-pixel alpha, but it does a bad blending job.
Any ideas how to tune it?
I suspect the problem is in the source bitmap. This is the kind of effect you get when the RGB values aren't premultiplied with the alpha. But ignore that because there is a far simpler way of doing this.
Create a layered window with a solid background colour by setting hbrBackground in the WNDCLASSEX structure.
Make the window partially transparent by calling SetLayeredWindowAttributes.
Position the window where you want it.
That's it.
This answer has code that illustrates the technique for a slightly different purpose.
I've seen here that you can create an image list with transparency. It works... sort of.
I used this to create an image list for a list control. The results were a little disappointing:
The one on the left is how it should look. The one on the right is how the list control is displaying it. It looks like it just tried to use the alpha as a mask and any blended area is attempted to be approximated by dithering. Is there a way of getting this better so that I get an actual alpha blended image?
Here is the source if that makes any difference:
class CDlg : public CDialog
{
DECLARE_DYNCREATE(CDlg)
public:
CDlg(CWnd* pParent = NULL); // standard constructor
virtual ~CDlg();
// Dialog Data
enum { IDD = IDD_BS_PRINT };
CGdiPlusBitmapResource m_pBitmap;
protected:
virtual void DoDataExchange(CDataExchange* pDX); // DDX/DDV support
virtual BOOL OnInitDialog();
DECLARE_MESSAGE_MAP()
public:
CListCtrl m_printOptions;
};
BOOL CDlg::OnInitDialog()
{
__super::OnInitDialog();
m_pBitmap.Load(IDB_RIBBON_HOMELARGE, _T("PNG"), AfxGetResourceHandle());
HBITMAP hBitmap;
m_pBitmap.m_pBitmap->GetHBITMAP(RGB(0, 0, 0), &hBitmap);
CImageList *pList = new CImageList;
CBitmap bm;
bm.Attach(hBitmap);
pList->Create(32, 32, ILC_COLOR32, 0, 4);
pList->Add(&bm, RGB(255, 0, 255));
m_printOptions.SetImageList(pList, LVSIL_NORMAL);
//...
return TRUE;
}
IMPLEMENT_DYNCREATE(CDlg, CDialog)
CBSPrintDlg::CBSPrintDlg(CWnd* pParent /*=NULL*/)
: CBCGPDialog(CBSPrintDlg::IDD, pParent)
{
}
CBSPrintDlg::~CBSPrintDlg()
{
}
void CBSPrintDlg::DoDataExchange(CDataExchange* pDX)
{
CBCGPDialog::DoDataExchange(pDX);
DDX_Control(pDX, IDC_PRINT_OPTIONS, m_printOptions);
}
For source of CGdiPlusBitmapResource implementation look here.
The original image with transparency is this:
#Barmak tried with a different image and it looks fine. I think that is because the transparency is near the edge and not located within the image. See here:
Edit ----------
First parameter in Gdiplus::GetHBITMAP should be the background color. Using RGB(0, 0, 0) as background color causes the semi-transparent pixels to match with black.
Using Gdiplus::Color(255,255,255,255) (white) it will improve the appearance (because ListView background is also white). But it's better to change the background to Gdiplus::Color(0,255,255,255) (transparent) to match any background.
{
CGdiPlusBitmapResource gdibmp;
if (gdibmp.Load(IDB_RIBBON_HOMELARGE, _T("PNG"), AfxGetResourceHandle()))
{
HBITMAP hBitmap;
gdibmp.m_pBitmap->GetHBITMAP(Gdiplus::Color::Transparent, &hBitmap);
ImageList_AddMasked(*pList, hBitmap, 0);
}
}
This assume images are all 32x32 pixels. If images are different sizes, they have to be resized before being added to image list.
{
CGdiPlusBitmapResource gdibmp;
if (gdibmp.Load(id, _T("PNG"), AfxGetResourceHandle()))
{
//resize image to 32x32 pixels
Gdiplus::Bitmap newBmp(32, 32, PixelFormat32bppPARGB);
double oldh = (double)gdibmp.m_pBitmap->GetHeight();
double oldw = (double)gdibmp.m_pBitmap->GetWidth();
double neww = 32;
double newh = 32;
double ratio = oldw / oldh;
if (oldw > oldh)
newh = neww / ratio;
else
neww = newh * ratio;
Gdiplus::Graphics graphics(&newBmp);
graphics.SetInterpolationMode(Gdiplus::InterpolationMode::InterpolationModeHighQualityBicubic);
graphics.SetSmoothingMode(Gdiplus::SmoothingModeAntiAlias);
graphics.DrawImage(gdibmp.m_pBitmap, 0, 0, (int)neww, (int)newh);
//add `newBmp` to image list
HBITMAP hBitmap;
newBmp.GetHBITMAP(Gdiplus::Color::Transparent, &hBitmap);
ImageList_AddMasked(m_ImageList, hBitmap, 0);
}
}
Using GdiPlus::GetHICON to get the icon handle... With CGdiPlusBitmapResource class, it should be possible to use the following:
HICON hicon;
m_pBitmap.Load(IDB_RIBBON_HOMELARGE, _T("PNG"), AfxGetResourceHandle());
m_pBitmap.m_pBitmap->GetHICON(&hicon);
pList->Add(hicon);
or using GetHBITMAP
Also make sure Visual Styles is enabled for improved appearance of ListView icons.
Test image with transparent background:
The PNG image contains pixels that are partially transparent (alpha < 255). That's a pretty common accident with a program like Photoshop, the most likely cause is overlaying the spyglass image on top of the document image and not merging the layers correctly.
As given, the image can only look good when it is displayed on top of the light-gray or white background. But that didn't happen, the background was black. Now making the anti-aliasing pixels around the spyglass painfully obvious, they turned various shades of dark-gray depending on their alpha value and no longer blend with the white background of the document image. A very typical mishap when you use GDI functions, it does not like alpha.
You can doctor it with GDI+, ensuring that the background color is correct. But that's a fair amount of work and it still leaves you with the trouble of guessing at the original background color correctly.
Just really rather best to go back to whatever painting tool you used and fix the problem there. Quickest fix ought to be re-saving it as a 24bpp BMP image file, ymmv.
I load a PNG image in a QPixmap/QImage and I want to crop it. Is there a function that does that in Qt, or how should I do it otherwise?
You can use QPixmap::copy:
QRect rect(10, 20, 30, 40);
QPixmap original('image.png');
QPixmap cropped = original.copy(rect);
There is also QImage::copy:
QRect rect(10, 20, 30, 40);
QImage original('image.png');
QImage cropped = original.copy(rect);
Use QImage instead of QPixmap:
QImage image("initial_image.jpg");
QImage copy ;
copy = image.copy( 0, 0, 128, 128);
copy.save("cropped_image.jpg");
This code will save a file cropped to upper left corner 128x128px.
Since you use QPixmap, you can use its copy method and supply it with a QRect to perform the actual crop.
Just use of the QPixmap's copy() functions.
This text is result of reading the first comment on your quiestion:
Sometimes it is better to wrap around an image. That is to have an image that is part of another image or in other words points to a part of another image. This is way the wrapped image does not require additional memory, except for its header. You can display or save the wrapped image without worries. The downside is that the original image must remain valid until you use the wrapped image, also if you are drawing in the wrapped image it will affect the source.
I'm trying to create a widget which paints directly to the windows Device Context by calling getDC() and painting an HBITMAP to it.
The widget I'm painting resides inside a scroll widget.
I've implemented the paintEvent() and it does seem to paint but immediatly after painting the widget gets painted over again with a blank gray color.
I've tried setting WA_PaintOnScreen and Qt::WA_NoSystemBackground but none of those help.
In theory this should be possible since this is basically how the GLWidget works.
What am I missing?
Found the answer here:
http://www.qtchina.net/qt4c++guiprogramming/ch20lev1sec1.html/
void GdiControl::paintEvent(QPaintEvent * /* event */)
{
RECT rect;
GetClientRect(winId(), &rect);
HDC hdc = GetDC(winId());
FillRect(hdc, &rect, HBRUSH(COLOR_WINDOW + 1));
SetTextAlign(hdc, TA_CENTER | TA_BASELINE);
TextOutW(hdc, width() / 2, height() / 2, text.utf16(), text.size());
ReleaseDC(winId(), hdc);
}
For this to work, we must also
reimplement
QPaintDevice::paintEngine() to return
a null pointer and set the
Qt::WA_PaintOnScreen attribute in the
widget's constructor.
EDIT: I've offered a bounty, since I doubt I'll be getting any answers otherwise.
Lately I've been working with listviews and I've decided to add an icon for each item indicating whether it's input or output. The icons add fine, but they're not transparent:
As can be seen, the icons are clearly not transparent. I'm currently doing something like this load the icons:
hImageList = ImageList_Create(16, 16, ILC_MASK | ILC_COLOR32, 2, 2);
if (hImageList != NULL)
{
iIN = ImageList_AddIcon(hImageList, LoadIcon(hInstance, MAKEINTRESOURCE(101)));
iOUT = ImageList_AddIcon(hImageList, LoadIcon(hInstance, MAKEINTRESOURCE(102)));
}
I've tried messing with the flags for ImageList_Create & LoadIcon/LoadImage but have had no luck and to be honest I've run out of ideas.
Any help would be very appreciated.
First up, ImageList_ReplaceIcon copies the icon data when adding it to an image list. So the HICON needs to be released afterwards.
Next, imagelists are natively bitmaps, not icons. And the way you are creating your imagelist makes the conversion of icon to bitmap very ambiguous. ILC_COLOR32 implies the imagelist should be created as a 32bit dib section, which typically contain transparency information via an embedded alpha channel. ILC_MASK instead implies that the internal bitmaps are DDB bitmaps, with the transparency information stored as a 1bpp mask bitmap.
The quickest solution to your problem - take your two icons:
Merge them into a single bitmap resource thats 32 pels wide by 16 high. Fill the background with a mask color :- purple or something.
Create the bitmap using ILC_COLOR|ILC_MASK
Load the bitmap being sure NOT to use LR_TRANSPARENT.
Add the bitmap using ImageList_AddMasked passing in a COLORREF that represents the mask color.
OR, for a better visual effect...
export your PNG data as a 32x16 32bpp bitmap file containing pre-multiplied alpha channel data.
Create the imagelist using the ILC_COLOR32 value.
LoadImage() with LR_CREATEDIBSECTION to load the bitmap as a 32bpp dib section.
Add the image using ImageList_Add()
(the last option is kind of tricky as the number of tools that support writing out 32bit bmp files with properly pre multiplied alpha channels is rather low).
Edited to add the following code sample. Using a 4bpp bitmap created in the dev environment this works just great :-
HWND hwndCtl = CreateWindowEx(0,WC_LISTVIEW,TEXT("ListView1"),WS_CHILD|WS_VISIBLE|WS_HSCROLL|WS_VSCROLL,0,0,cx,cy,hWnd,(HMENU)101,hModule,NULL);
HBITMAP hbm = (HBITMAP)LoadImage(hModule,MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDB_BITMAP1),IMAGE_BITMAP,0,0,0);
COLORREF crMask=RGB(255,0,255);
HIMAGELIST himl = ImageList_Create(16,16,ILC_COLOR|ILC_MASK,2,0);
ImageList_AddMasked(himl,hbm,crMask);
ListView_SetImageList(hwndCtl,himl,LVSIL_NORMAL);
You want to make your icons have a background color that isn't used anywhere else in the icon, like a really ugly purple, and then use LoadImage(..., LR_LOADTRANSPARENT); The flag says look at the first pixel at 0,0 and make everything that color transparent.
Your code looks fine to me, I always use LoadImage instead of LoadIcon but I suspect that doesn't matter. Have you checked that the icons do indeed have transparent areas and don't themselves have a solid background?
My LoadImage calls look like:
HICON hIcon = (HICON)LoadImage(hinstResources,MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDI_ICON),IMAGE_ICON,16,16,LR_DEFAULTCOLOR);
Here... Create an ImageList, as suggested, make your icons into a Bitmap, 16 pixels high, by 16*n long, where n= the number of icons...
Set the background color to 255, 0, 255, like you have done.
Then, load it, and add it to the image list as I did here:
m_ImageList.Create(16, 16, ILC_COLOR16 | ILC_MASK, 7, 1);
CBitmap bm;
bm.LoadBitmap(IDB_SUPERTREEICONS);
m_ImageList.Add(&bm, RGB(255, 0, 255));
GetTreeCtrl().SetImageList(&m_ImageList, TVSIL_NORMAL);
Of course, this was written in MFC, but as you know, it's just a wrapper to Win32...
Outside of this, you are going to have to go to a custom draw control, in which you draw the icon over whatever background the icon happens to be sitting on. There isn't really any magic "transparent" color, that I know of, in any of these controls.
In the case of a custom draw, you need to use code like the following:
#define TRANSPARENT_COLOR (255,0,255)
UINT iBitmap = IDB_ICON_UP
CDC *dc = GetDC();
int x = 0, y = 0;
CDC *pDisplayMemDC = new CDC;
CDC *pMaskDC = new CDC;
CDC *pMemDC = new CDC;
CBitmap *pBitmap = new CBitmap;
CBitmap *pMaskBitmap = new CBitmap;
CBitmap *pMemBitmap = new CBitmap;
int cxLogo, cyLogo;
BITMAP bm;
pBitmap->LoadBitmap(iBitmap);
pDisplayMemDC->CreateCompatibleDC(dc);
CBitmap *pOldBitmap = (CBitmap *)pDisplayMemDC->SelectObject(pBitmap);
pBitmap->GetObject(sizeof(bm), &bm);
cxLogo = bm.bmWidth;
cyLogo = bm.bmHeight;
pMaskBitmap->CreateBitmap(cxLogo, cyLogo, 1, 1, NULL);
pMaskDC->CreateCompatibleDC(dc);
CBitmap *pOldMask = (CBitmap *)pMaskDC->SelectObject(pMaskBitmap);
COLORREF oldBkColor = pDisplayMemDC->SetBkColor(TRANSPARENT_COLOR);
pMaskDC->BitBlt(0, 0, cxLogo, cyLogo, pDisplayMemDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY);
pMemBitmap->CreateCompatibleBitmap(dc, cxLogo, cyLogo);
pMemDC->CreateCompatibleDC(dc);
CBitmap *pOldMem = (CBitmap *)pMemDC->SelectObject(pMemBitmap);
pMemDC->BitBlt(0, 0, cxLogo, cyLogo, dc, x, y, SRCCOPY);
pMemDC->BitBlt(0, 0, cxLogo, cyLogo, pDisplayMemDC, 0, 0, SRCINVERT);
pMemDC->BitBlt(0, 0, cxLogo, cyLogo, pMaskDC, 0, 0, SRCAND);
pMemDC->BitBlt(0, 0, cxLogo, cyLogo, pDisplayMemDC, 0, 0, SRCINVERT);
dc->BitBlt(x, y, cxLogo, cyLogo, pMemDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY);
delete pMemDC->SelectObject(pOldMem);
delete pMemDC;
delete pMaskDC->SelectObject(pOldMask);
delete pMaskDC;
delete pDisplayMemDC->SelectObject(pOldBitmap);
delete pDisplayMemDC;
This code decides where to draw the icon, and takes a snapshot of the background, creates a mask for the icon, and then draws it over the background, giving it a fully transparent background...
Hope that helps somewhat. If not, please explain in more detail what you are trying to make happen, and what you are seeing, or what you are NOT seeing...
I struggled with the same issue using an ImageList in a Tree View. I eventually got Chris Becke's second solution to work, creating an ImageList using the ILC_COLOR32 flag and using LoadImage() with the LR_CREATEDIBSECTION flag. This solution, and probably also the first solution, requires what is described below.
Transparency (and themes) are only supported with comctl32.dll version 6+, to use the correct version, the pre-processor directive on this page worked for me:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/cookbook-overview