I used a high resolution DSLR camera to shoot my images, which resulted in very large images and file sizes (average image: 3.4mb). In my shoots I took between 25 and 65 images. When importing these into photoshop, I realised that file size may be a problem. I was using a mac with only 1gb of RAM, which really slowed down the process. Once I imported all of the photos and merged them into one photoshop file, I was working with a (at the smallest) 1gb file. My restaurant panorama was a PSB of nearly 2gbs. These panoramas had around a 10 meter print length! (The restaurant one was around 25 meters!)
Working in such a high resolution really ate at the computers power, and simple tasks such as cropping took atleast 3-5 minutes (no joke). However, whilst not being the most efficient way of working, I chose to work at full resolution, so I had much higher quality images to work with.
Once I had finished the panoramas, I saved them as a PSB (which took around 7 minutes...) and then lowered the resolution.
By keeping the width and height relative, I lowered the height to 400, which in turn changed the width. I lowered the images to 400px high as this is the size of the panorama viewing window that we were given for the HTML delivery. This lowered the resolution by a fair amount, and also the file size. This process took a working file of around 1.5gbs to around 35mbs. Once the file size was lowered, it was alot smaller but still to large for web delivery. Using the "Save for Web & Devices" tool in Photoshop, I was able to save out the image as a JPG, bringing the file size to around 1.5mb. This is still large for major web delivery, but it retains a high enough quality so that the image is not distorted for maximum viewing capability.
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