I’m very impressed with the results produced by the latest version of PhotoVista. I forgot to level the camera for this panorama, and the results are still nearly perfect.

There are still a few steps involved to get this kind of quality.

1. Shoot 8 RAW images using a Nikkor 14mm lens with the camera in portrait orientation on a Kaidan Panoramic head.
2. Open the 8 RAW images in PhotoShop, apply color-correction, dust spot when necessary.
3. Apply the amazing PTLens filter to each image to correct for minor distortion introduced by the wide-angle lens.
4. Save the images as high-quality JPEG’s. (I could choose non-lossy compression at this point, but I know the image will be greatly reduced in size for the web, so a little compression is OK here.)
5. Open the eight corrected images in PhotoVista and create a 360 degree panorama. (This is now the easiest part!)
6. Save the resulting panorama as a high-quality JPEG.
7. Open the panorama in PhotoShop and apply color-correction, spotting, sharpening, etc. as needed.
8. Reduce the size of the 18,000 pixel-wide panorama to something that will work on the web. This is done in steps – reducing the size 90% or so several times, sometimes applying a little sharpening along the way until reaching the desired size – in this case 5,000 pixels wide.
9. Create a custom VR page using the .ivr file created by PhotoVista.
10. Maybe even make a highly compressed version of the original file at its native size for those who have bandwidth to spare.
11. Make an entry on the blog!