i have created a Bitmap using GDI+.I am drawing text on to that bitmap using GDI Drawtext.Using Drawtext i am unable to apply tranparency.
Any help or code will be appreciated.
If you want to draw text without a background fill, SetBkMode(hdc,TRANSPARENT) will tell GDI to leave the background when drawing text.
To actually render the foreground color of the text with alpha... is going to be more complicated. GDI does not actually support alpha channels all that widely in its APIs. Outside of AlphaBlend actually all it does is preserve the channel. Its actually not valid to set the upper bits of a COLOREF to alpha values as the high byte is actually used for flags to indicate whether the COLOREF is (rather than an RGB value) a palette entry.
So, unfortunately, your only real way forward is to:
Create a 32bit DIBSection. (CreateDIBSection). This gives you an HBITMAP that is guaranteed to be able to hold alpha information. If you create a bitmap via one of the other bitmap creation functions its going to be at the device colordepth that might not be 32bpp.
DrawText onto the DIBSection.
When you created the DIBSection you got a pointer to the actual memory. At this point you need to go through the memory and set the alpha values. I don't think that DrawText is going to do anything to the alpha channel by itself at all. Im thinking a simple check of the RGB components of each DWORD of the bitmap - if theyre the forground color, rewrite the DWORD with a 50% (or whatever) alpha in the alpha byte, if theyre the background color, rewrite with a 100% alpha in the alpha byte. *
AlphaBlend the bitmap onto the final destination. AlphaBlend requires the alpha channel in the source to be pre-multiplied.
*
It might be sufficient to simply memset the DIBSection with a 50% alpha before doing the DrawText, and ensure that the BKColor is black. I don't know what DrawText might do to the alpha channel though. Some experimentation is called for.
SIMPLE and EASY solution:)
Had this problem, i tried to change alpha values and premultiply, but there was another problem - antialiased and cleartype fonts where not shown correctly (ugly edges). So what i did...
Compose your scene (bitmaps, graphics, etc.)
BitBlt required rectangle from this scene (same as your text rectangle, from the place where you want your text to be) to memory DC with compatible bitmap selected at 0,0 destination coordinates
Draw Your text to that rectangle in memory DC.
Now AlphaBlend that rectangle without AC_SRC_ALPHA in the BLENDFUNCTION and with desired SourceConstantAlpha from this memory DC back to your scene DC.
I think You got it :)
Hmmmm - trying to do same here - wondering - I see that when you create a dib section youi specify the "masks" that is a R,G,B (and alpha) mask.
IF and thats a big if it really does not alter the alpha chhannel, then you might specify the mask differently for two bitmap headers. ONe specifies thr RGB in the proper places, the other makes them all have their bits assigned to the alpha channel. (set the text color to white in this case) then render in two passes, one to load the color values, the other to load the alpha values.
???? anyway just musing :)
While this question is about making text semi-transparent, I had the opposite problem.
DrawText was making the text in my layered window (UpdateLayeredWindow) semi-transparent ... and I didn't want it to be.
Take a look at this other question ... since in the other question I post some code that you could easily modify ... and is almost exactly what Chris Becke suggests in his answer.
A limited answer for a specific situation:
If you have a graphic with alpha channel and you want to draw opaque text over a locally opaque background, first prepare your 32 bit bitmap with 32 bit brushes created with CreateDIBPatternBrushPt. Then scan through the bitmap bits inverting the alpha channel, draw your text as you normally would (including SetBkMode to TRANSPARENT), then invert the alpha in the bitmap again. You can skip the first inversion if you invert the alpha of your brushes.
Related
Using OpenGL ES 1.1.
The picture I am generating is being color-keyed later on down the line. It replaces one color (magenta) with something else.
So I clean the background with that color, draw on top of it, and everything is good.
However, textures with an alpha channel cause some complications. I effectively want to use only maximum or minimum alpha, and show the background OR show the image blended with, say, black.
My mostly-working hack has the texture data manually adjusted force the alpha channel to either min or max, and do pre-multiplication for the actual color value, and this mostly works.
However, when the texture size changes, I get a little bit of filtering and some magenta goes through.
So:
1) Is there some combination of glBlendFunc and glTexEnv combiner functions that will let me stop manually editing the textures?
or, failing that....
2) What parameters should I use when drawing the texture to keep alpha at either 0 or 1 when it's scaling?
Use alpha testing instead of blending. Use glAlphaFunc to select a comparision function and reference value. Enable with glEnable(GL_ALPHA_TEST) (and disable once you no longer need it during rendering).
Aero glass causes alot of people problems trying to draw on it. Anything with an alpha value of 255 seems to be treated as transparent with DWM using an additive blur to draw it. I want a part of client area to use Aero glass with the rest of it treated as opaque, so I don't have to deal with the headache of common controls not rendering properly.
MSDN lists a function DwmEnableBlurBehindWindow which lets you mark part of the client area as blurred by DWM. It takes a DWM_BLURBEHIND pointer which which has an HRGN handle to the region of the window. When I use this function, the entire window becomes transparent with an additive blend, but only the region of the window I passed to DwmEnableBlurBehindWindow gets blurred. Is there a way I can keep the rest of the window from becoming transparent?
What I have looks a bit like:
blur.dwFlags = DWM_BB_ENABLE | DWM_BB_BLURREGION;
blur.hRgnBlur = CreateRectRgn(0, 0, 90, 90);
blur.fEnable = true;
DwmEnableBlurBehindWindow(hwnd, &blur);
RECT rect;
GetClientArea(&rect);
FillRect(hdc, &rect, CreateSolidBrush(0));
From the MSDN Library article:
The alpha values in the window are honored and the rendering atop the blur will use these alpha values. It is the applications responsiblity for ensuring that the alpha values of all pixels in the window are correct. Some GDI operations do not perserve alpha values so care must be taken when presenting child windows as the alpha values they contribute are unpredicitable.
Make that most GDI operations, like FillRect(). The brush you created is drawn with 24-bit colors, the alpha will be 0. Which makes the window transparent. You'll need to switch to, say, GDI+. Text is particularly troublesome. As well as legacy Windows controls, like EDIT and LISTBOX which draw with GDI.
I am using layered windows and drawing a rounded rectangle on the screen. However, I'd like to smooth out the jagged edges. I think that I'll need alpha blending for this. Is there a way I can do this with GDI?
CreateDIBSection. Fill in the BITMAPINFOHEADER with 32bpp. Fill in the alpha channel with pre-multiplied alpha and youre good to go.
AlphaBlend is the API to actually blit 32 bpp bitmaps with an aplha channel.
You can do this in C# using the LockBits method of the BitMap class (see this question for an explanation). You definitely don't want to use GetPixel and SetPixel for this, as they are hideously slow (even though you'd just be manipulating the edges and not the entire bitmap).
Any chance of using GDI+ instead of GDI? It supports antialiasing and transparency right out of the box.
There isn't an easy way to do such drawing with just GDI calls. What you want isn't just alpha blending: you want anti-aliasing. That usually involves drawing what you want at a larger resolution and then scaling down.
What I've done in the past for similar problems is to use an art program to draw whatever shape I want (e.g. a rounded corner) much larger than I needed it in black and white. When I wanted to draw it I would scale the black and white bitmap to whatever size I wanted (using a variant of a scaling class from Code Project). This gives me a grayscale image that I can use as an alpha channel, which I'd then use for alpha blending, either by calling the Win32 function AlphaBlend, or by using a DIBSection and manually changing the appropriate pixels.
Another variation of this approach would be to allocate a DIBSection about four times larger than you wanted the final result, draw into that, and then use the above scaling class to scale it down: the scaling from a larger image will give the appropriate smoothing effect.
If all this sounds like quite a lot of work: well, it is.
EDIT: To answer the title of this question: you can create a bitmap with an alpha channel by calling CreateDIBSection. That won't on its own do what you want though, I think.
I have a Win32 GUI application that uses GDI havily. It needs to draw text over a bitmap at specified coordinates and later erase it and substitute with the original bitmap.
I proceed as follows:
select font (GetStockObject( DEFAULT_GUI_FONT)), brush, other stuff into the device context
call GetTextExtentPoint32() to compute the size of the text
now having the text starting point I can compute the expected text rectangle and store it
call TextOut() for the same device context with the same starting point and the same text
and later restore the bitmap for the store rectangle.
It works fine when ClearType antialiasing is off. But with ClearType on the size returned by GetTextExtentPoint32() is slightly smaller than the size actually occupied by the text when TextOut() is called. So when I later restore the original bitmap some small stripes of the text remain in place and I have artifacts.
Is there any cure to this without disabling ClearType?
You could also try DrawText with DT_CALCRECT to compute the string size. Maybe it works better.
Also you can then write the string with DrawText inside a rectangle with the sizes equal to the one you get with DT_CALCRECT and it will clip the text in case it is a bit larger.
Does anybody have any pointers on how to successfully draw a bitmap that has
an alpha channel using Graphics::DrawImage() when the Graphics context is
created based on a printer HDC? The printer drivers don't generally support alpha blending - so is there an alternative to rendering everything to an offscreen bitmap and just sending that to the printer. This is often not feasible, especially for high res printing to large format printers.
What kind of printer is that? Regular printers don't print white. Create in-memory image and 'flatten' it (remove alpha channel) and then print the result.
Have you tried drawing a white rectangle to initialize the image before you call the DrawImage method?
The whole point is that I need the line-drawn graphics behind the image to be visible. I did try filling the rectangle first the with RGBA color of (255, 255, 255, 0) but this does not help. Pixels with an alpha value of zero do get printed as fully transparent but partially transparent pixels are drawn fully opaque.
Thanks for asking this question because I was just thinking of perhaps trying to use GDIplus to see whether it could get me around the problems I'm still facing getting patterned diamond shapes to print correctly. Although nowadays alpha-blending does appear to work on most printers, there are still some that draw black corners on the diamonds.
Aside from alpha-blending, I've also tried using diamond-shaped clip regions to surround the shape, but normally the printers that don't support alpha-blending don't seem to support polygonal clip-regions either. I've tried copying from the printer-dc into a bitmap to prime it before drawing the diamond on top, hoping that this will allow me to put back (in the corners) what was there before. This doesn't work either because it appears that the problem boils down to the fact that the printer driver doesn't actually know what is being printed on what part of the page.
In my case, my next plan is to try using a large bitmap brush for drawing the diamond fill directly to the printer hdc. I suspect there's a moderate chance that this too will fail for certain printers. It sounds like it may not be an option for what you were doing.