gradient fill

Simply make a solid background, then take your selection tool with a feather on it and select the inside. Then right click and select fill, black. You'll have the inside black and it's fading into your solid color.

Hope that's right... didn't read the entire thread :P

Hey meamjw, glad to see you didn't give up either.

Ok, well, looking at what you posted, I really don't think a gradient is going to give you the effect you're looking for. This looks like the job for a bevel. Unfortunately, I don't think the bevel effect will get you where you want to go with this either, although you may want to play around with it some. I think you need to make a custom bevel.

You wanted a detailed how-to, so here's how I'd do this:

Fill your first layer with black. This is your background. Pull out guides to where you want your outer and inner edges to lay. Set the color you want your border as the foreground color, and choose black for the background color. Then, click and hold on the shape tool and choose the rounded corner tool - in the tool bar window choose a corner radius that will give you the corners you want - probably 40 px or so - play with it to get it right. Now click and drag your shape to follow the OUTSIDE guidelines - this shape should be on its own layer, right above your black background. Now go to your layer palette and right click on the shape you just drew, then choose Rasterize Layer - you're going to edit this shape in just a bit. But first, go back and choose your rounded corner shape tool again, and this time click and drag the shape following the INSIDE guidelines. You should now have a solid shape on its own layer that rests inside your previous, rasterized OURSIDE shape. Ok, now hit X on your keyboard, and switch the foreground color to black. What you're going to do now is draw the "shadow" that will give that border its beveled/3D look. You're going to draw this shape so that it's half way between the inner and outer guidelines of your border - just eye it, or pull out four more guidelines to help you. Again - this rounded corner shape should be on its own layer as well, on top of the other two. Once this black shape is drawn, right click on this shape, and rasterize it like you did with the first OUTSIDE edge shape. With this layer still active, go to your filters menu and choose Blur>Gaussian Blur, slide the radius slider to, oh about 9 or 10 px, and click ok. Now, go back to your layers palette, and Cmd/Cntl+click on the layer you drew for the INSIDE guidelines - you should see the pointer hand change shape so it looks like it has a dotted box over it. This will select the shape in that layer with the famous "marching ants." With that selection active, go back and click on the black, blurred "shadow" layer. Hit delete. Next, in your layers palette, select the first shape you drew for the OUTSIDE edge. Again, hit delete. Press Cmd/Cntl + d on your keyboard to get rid of the "marching ant" selection. Now go to the layers palette again, and delete the INSIDE guideline shape layer by dragging it into the trash on the layers palette. Finally, click on the black "shadow" layer, and pull the opacity slider down to about 65% or so.

Now you should have something that looks like what you posted.

Hope this long-winded rant helps.

Hey Raijer, that's super! One of the best tutorials I've come across! I know you must have done this as an experiment for this tutorial. No one could remember all those details a considerable while later. At least not unless their memory is many times better than mine. Thanks so much. And thanks again to all who contributed. I'm very satisfied now, so will close this thread.