THE MAKING...

To begin with I needed to get hold of a tripod, stand in my location (A garden, a flat and a train carriage) and take photographs all around me, slowing turning the tripod so each image will be overlapped...

I then had to put them in order in Photoshop, making each image a different layer, and line them up roughly. This was made easier by dropping the opacity on the layer you move, so you can align objects shown through the layer underneath...

I then went through each layer and added an adjustment layer, mainly to adjust the brightness and contrast to match with the next image...

I was then left with a line wherever a new layer begun, although it helped a great deal playing with the brightness I then had to add a layer mask. A layer mask allows you to mask out parts of a layer and reveal the layer underneath, you can blend them together until you no longer see a line...Blending took me a long time on all 3 images, sometimes I masked to much a layer away and had to start again, you have to be very gentle and soft with it.

I then had to flatten the image, find a sensible point in the panorama which I could cut and match up easily (eg. something like a plain white wall) Make a selection to where I want to split it, make that selection a layer and make the other half a layer the swap them round so the ends were now in the middle. This is where I found a lot of problems...

With two of my images (garden and train) the ends didn't match up at all. As I was turning the tripod it was slowly moving down as I went (as happened with two other images I had to discard) this meant that I had to crop quite a lot out of the image and also a lot of playing around with the ends (mainly warping as shown in a previous post) But, in the garden panorama I made a selection and copied it into a new layer on top (see below)
I then had to warp this layer so that the lines matched up and with a bit a blending it was starting to look better. Although this part was the hardest of the whole project and I'm still really not happy with it.

When I was happy with the images, I saved a jpeg and I had to use a program called Sticher to convert the panorama to a working QTVR, this was a very quick and simple exercise and there I had my QTVR!