I am trying to transition from a flat surface to a curved surface but I run into shading problems. I’ve attached a picture of the objects. Any suggestions on the best method would be really appreciated.
Faces have all have two different sides. You can see that by the colour of the face. The lighter side is the normal side, and is the one you want facing outwards. Your shading shows that the normals are facing inwards, showing the reverse (darker) side.
To fix this, you can select the faces which are facing inwards, and do either two things:
- An easy way is by flipping the normals by going to the search bar activated by [space bar] and search for flip normals. This will change the direction the selected faces are.
- You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+N, which flips normals to the outside (however it does not work all the time, and does not specifically flip the normals, only calculates the direction selected faces should face.)
I’ve checked my normals. They are all facing correctly.
My problem is gradually increasing the flat part of the lip on the panel to merge with the curved arm rest. Trying to do it one vertice at a time creates all kinds of problems. Is there a modifier that might work or will proportional editing work?
I, for one, really don’t understand what you mean by, “run into shading problems.” Please attach a blend file, or a rendered image highlighting the “problems.”
Shading may be the wrong description. The surface was uneven but I think I have solved my problem. Thanks for the help.
It’s always nice if you could post a follow-up comment to bring your thread to useful closure for the next person who stumbles upon this thread. What do you mean by “uneven” and how did you solve your problem? … 
Basically I deleted the curved part of the arm rest and re-extruded it. Then I straightened the last row of vertices and rotated it to match the panel.