A target designed for opacity studies of dense plasmas by laser direct heating and self-backlighting technique was presented and tested. The backlight source and sample plasma were generated by directing a frequency-tripled Nb-glass laser onto an Au/CH/Al/CH multilayer target on the XG-II laser facility, and the absorption of the sample plasma was obtained by measuring the attenuated backlight spectrum of the sample plasma. One-dimensional radiative hydrodynamic code Multi-1D was used to simulate the laser heating of the multilayer target, and the temperature and density profiles in the target were given. Experimental data were compared with the theoretically calculated spectra using the detailed-term-accounting model, which showed a temperature range from 20 eV to 70 eV in the sample plasma, a result in quite good agreement with the Multi-1D simulations.