How can I have an opaque UIView as a subview of a semi-transparent UIView?

Question

I have a UIView with an alpha of 0.5 which I add as a subview to my primary view in order to gray-out everything else. I want to add an additional UIView to this gray UIView as a subview - the problem is that when I do this, my newly-added subview is also partially transparent.

Is there any way to make a subview "ignore" the alpha value of its superview and be itself fully opaque?

Answer 1

Set the UIView background color alpha not it's alpha directly.

Objective-C

UIView *view; ... view.backgroundColor = [[UIColor blackColor] colorWithAlphaComponent:.6]; 

It's not the same as:

view.backgroundColor = [UIColor blackColor];     view.alpha = .6; 

Swift

view.backgroundColor = UIColor.black.withAlphaComponent(0.6) 

Answer 2

No, not really. What you want is to take your overlay view, and make it just have a clear background color. As a subview of that new overlay place your view that will grey things out. And as a sibling view to that put your view you want to be opaque.

[OpaqueView] [DimmingView]      |             |       [OverlayView]