Help With Gradients

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!