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How to overlay your background images

selbekk on June 26, 2019

I learned two nice little tricks today, and thought I'd write a short article on them. The challenge Often, we have background images t...
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Roman Veselý •

Nice usage of custom css properties! But I'm worried about the example with box-shadow - it could be really heavy for mobile devices.

I'd rather avoid that one, and keep it just as an example of how many possible ways we have ;)

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selbekk profile image
selbekk •

Yeah I was wondering if it would cause any perf issues. I’ll add a note about it :-)

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r4venw profile image
Gab • • Edited

This is really great! I just spent waay too long trying to accomplish this using the "old way"--you're a life saver.
Just one question: where do you learn about these sorts of modern CSS approaches? There are a lot of mediocre resources out there (I'm looking at you, W3Schools) and it's hard to know what's worth reading through

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selbekk • • Edited

Hi! I’m glad you found it useful!

To be honest, most of these techniques I’ve read about in blogs and other non-structured places of learning.

MDN is great as a reference, css-tricks.com is great for picking up techniques, and tympnus is great for inspiration.
and css.christmas is great for, well, small tips and tricks - that was our project for Christmas last year 😄

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r4venw profile image
Gab •

Thanks for the suggestions!
I have already started reading through css.christmas--very funny! I look forward to reading the rest of it.

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Duncan M. MacGregor •

This is very clever! Thank you for sharing.

Just one question, how well supported is the var(--image-url) method?

I can't seem to find it on caniuse.com.

Cheers!

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selbekk •

It’s not supported in IE, unfortunately, since it doesn’t support css dynamic properties. Otherwise, it’s well supported.

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Duncan M. MacGregor •

Ahhh, that darn web browser! haha
That's great news it's supported by modern browsers.
Thanks again, really appreciate the knowledge :-)

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Marcelo Rodrigues •

Thank you. Save me.

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Peter Hoffmann •

Could the same result be also archived by CSS filters?

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selbekk •

Great question! Yeah, you'd think that by adding a filter: brightness(0.5), you'd end up with something similar. Unfortunately, that darkens everything, including the content in front of the background image.

Here's a codepen showing what I mean:

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gsotelo23 profile image
G •

Awesome! This really helped me a lot!

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selbekk •

Thanks for letting me know! 🥳

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07Zee07 •

Somehow it doesn't work for me with grid. I only get the invalid property value on the style="--........

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selbekk •

sorry to hear! Are you using React or something? I'd love to help, but there's not a lot I can do with the information provided ☹️

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07Zee07 •

hi!
truth be told this is my first website and I am a bit in the dark. I have nested grids applied and very minimal styles (just some font, plus the necessary for the grid to map out the grid areas)
I just wanted a nice overlay for the background pic so the text would be more readable (and it would look a bit fancier too)

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07Zee07 •

I must apologize.
one word: TYPO
it doesn't matter how many times I read my code I could not find it. I made my partner read it, and bang!
lesson learned!!
people! make others read your code too!!
I'm sorry, it's working fine!!!

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aamangeldina •

This is really helpful and working perfectly! Thank you so much!

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selbekk profile image
selbekk •

I'm glad you found it helpful! :)

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angelo rogerio rubin •

What a wonderful article, THANK YOU!

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selbekk •

Thanks for letting me know! 🎉

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Bilell Ghersa •

Thnx dude that was helpfull