Hi, I recently needed to place a semi transparent layer over a background image in order to make my label(text) controls more readable. Although I've tinkered with GDI+ functions, child guis etc., in the end I've come up with this. This UDF takes advantage of trancexx's GIFAnimations UDF and creates semi-transparent layer using several embeded(binary) PNG images. I think it is very easy to use and it does the job the effective way without calling/registering bunch of redraw functions etc.