Turn On or Off Transparency Effects in Windows 10

How to Turn On or Off Transparency Effects in Windows 10

Windows 10 allows the user to have transparency effects enabled or disabled for the taskbar, Start, and Action center. Disabling them disables acrylic Fluent Design effects for Store apps, the Settings app, and the Start menu.

Transparency effects are enabled by default in Windows 10. When you open the Start menu, it appears semi-transparent with the blur effect.

Transparency Effects are enabled:

Transparency Effects are disabled:

Blur will be significantly reduced for the full screen Start menu, making the desktop wallpaper visible behind it.

Also, starting in Windows 10 build 18298, turning off transparency effects will disable the blur effect for the sign-in screen background picture.

You can enable disable or enable transparency effects in Windows 10 using the following three methods.

To Turn On or Off Transparency Effects in Windows 10,

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Navigate to Personalization > Colors on the left.
3. Turn off or on the toggle option Transparency effects in the right page.
4. You are done.

Tip: You can open the Colors page of Settings directly. Press the Win + R shortcut keys together on your keyboard and type the following in the Run box: ms-settings:colors. For the full list of ms-settings commands available in Windows 10, refer to the following article: ms-settings Commands in Windows 10 (Settings Page URI Shortcuts).

If you disable the Transparency effects option, transparency effects will be disabled for the taskbar, Start menu, and Action center, along with the blur effect on the sign-in screen.

Note: Starting in Windows 10 build 18312, there is a new group policy that you can use to disable the acrylic blur effect for the sign-in screen without disabling transparency effects for your user account. See the following article: Disable Blur on Sign-in Screen in Windows 10 with Group Policy. Also, Winaero Tweaker allows disabling it:

Alternatively, transparency effects can be disabled in Ease of Access settings.

Turn On or Off Transparency Effects in Ease of Access Settings

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Navigate to Ease of Access > Display on the left.
3. Turn off or on the toggle option Show transparency in Windows on the right side, under Simplify and personalize Windows.
4. You are done.

Finally. you can disable or enable transparency effects with a Registry tweak.

Turn On or Off Transparency Effects in Registry

1. Open the Registry Editor app.
2. Go to the following Registry key.
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Themes\Personalize. See how to open a Registry key with one click.
3. On the right, modify or create a new 32-Bit DWORD value EnableTransparency. Note: Even if you are running 64-bit Windows you must still create a 32-bit DWORD value.
4. Set its value to 1 to enable transparency effects.
5. Set its value data to 0 to disable transparency effects.
6. To make the changes done by the Registry tweak take effect, you need to sign out and sign in to your user account. Alternatively, you can restart the Explorer shell.

That's it!