Powertoys: [Feature Request] Add background acrylic to Image Resizer and Color Picker

[TheXamlGuy]

Seeing as Image Resizer and Color Picker PowerToys have both had a recent makeover to fit in with the Fluent UI guidelines it'll be nice to go a bit further and to introduce Acrylic into the mix with background acrylic.

I have tested this in a small sample app with ModernWPF (which is what the Image Resizer and Colour Picker are using) with FluentWpfChromes, and it seems to work really well together.

[niels9001]

100% agree, ideally we would have used it already across all the apps that were redesigned. With moving these apps over to WinUI, we can probably adopt it at some point (v3.1?).

For WPF, there doesn't seem to be an 'official' way to use Acrylic rendered via the Composition APIs. To my knowledge, these WPF attempts try to mimic Acrylic (but not 100% though?). My worry is that these implementations are not as optimized in terms of performance and power consumption as true Acrylic is. We've seen the same when using WPF shadows on moving elements vs. UWP/WinUI ThemeShadows.

But again, I might be completely wrong! I'm all for adopting acrylic either way and would be happy to implement it. But only if it doesn't have any negative consequences :).

[TheXamlGuy]

I am pretty sure this is the only official way to get the proper Acrylic effect on a Win32 Window, albeit I believe it is undocumented. Rafael himself has documented it on his blog @ https://www.withinrafael.com/2018/02/02/adding-acrylic-blur-to-your-windows-10-apps-redstone-4-desktop-apps/ and it used within Ear Trumpet although there's been better ways to implement it (like with FluentWpfChromes) since then.

There's a few other OS projects that have implemented the Acrylic effect via the SetWindowCompositionAttribute , i.e. https://github.com/sourcechord/FluentWPF

[ShankarBUS]

So, I've kind of found another way to achieve acrylic effect in WPF.

Using the same Composition API that UWP/WinUI acrylic brush uses.

See my comment (I also included a demo app, please ignore other comments 😅).
https://github.com/ShankarBUS/ModernFlyouts/issues/66#issuecomment-734953522

Given that we can use Composition APIs in WPF, we can make a port of the AcrylicBrush APIs to C#.

You can also decompile the demo app's source code to see its internal APIs.

Bye!