There two different kinds of Enhanced Standard controls that can be obtained changing the Style property value:

(For more details on button styles, see How to change the button style. For more detail on setting button properties, see How to use the control in your projects)

By default, the appearance of these controls differs little from the standard Microsoft controls.

But 3D Active Button Magic gives you the power to do so much more!

Checkboxes and option buttons have many of the same capabilities as buttons in Graphical Command Button style. The interior of the control can be transparent, as above, or they may share a graphic, as below.

Each of these checkboxes are 3D Active Button Magic controls with the Style property set to STYLE_CHECKBOX_STD.  A similar result would be obtained by setting the Style property to STYLE_RADIOBUTTON_STD.

In order to support this kind of transparency, the three checkboxes must know exactly which portion of the underlying picture they are currently covering: how can they know this information? That's not a problem: simply set their SurfaceTransparentFactor property to 1 (or higher value) and they will automatically render using the underlying picture portion.

IMPORTANT NOTE: when using this kind of transparency, avoid using picture files whose vertical and horizontal dimensions in pixels are far bigger that the control dimensions because this causes useless memory overhead that could slow down your application: always use pictures whose dimensions are very near to the Picture control dimensions.