Help With Gradients

[skoz55]

I am designing a header for a client and have run into and issue getting the gradients right. A part of the logo has a "swoosh" effect (similar to Nike). I'd like to make this swoosh appear to fade into the background thus am trying to make a gradient evenly around the curved edges and fade into transparent. My two questions:

1. How do you get a gradient to fade from one color to transparent? I realize I could just fad to the background color, however I'm going to use this on a couple of background colors, thus fading to transparent would make it work on all.

2. How do you get a gradient even around the edges? I've attached a pic of the original swoosh (bottom) and what I'm trying to do (top pic). I just used the eraser to show the fade effect, however it obviously is not precise.

Thanks.

Header.jpg

[Revision12]

You might want to try Gaussian Blur.
Mess around with the settings and you should get something you can use that fades evenly to transparent around the edge.

[Leprakawn]

If you would upload (or provide a link to) the file, I could probably knock it out in a matter of time.

Edit: (15 minutes later)
Okay... so I figured it out already.


Try adding this style to the swoosh—adjust the gradient settings to get the fade you are looking for—and it should work.


Have fun!

[Leprakawn]

Or there are a couple other methods to the madness if you want to try it a different way.

Let's say your swoosh is a custom shape. From the path menu, right-mouse click it, and hit "Make selection." Then you will be able to adjust the feather radius to your liking (probably somewhere btwn 15-30 for you), and you should see the ant trail surrounding your shape.

Next, go to the Layers tab, and press Ctrl+n for a new layer. Then press alt+backspace (make sure to press d to select default colours) to get the black fade. Finally, you can hide the shape layer... and now your have another way of doing it!


Here is something I found on YouTube.

[Leprakawn]

I completely forgot to mention this in my prev post, but if you need help with creating custom shapes, here is a [strike]tutorial[/strike] blog discussing how to do that:
http://www.htmlcenter.com/blog/photosho ... om-shapes/

Best of luck!