Hi Scott and Dave

If you do not have Photoshop or access to it, try Gimp. I've done some panos using the Gimp without too much of a pain. The process using Gimp is as follows:

1) Make sure your pano's size is exactly 8192 x 4096.
2) Add guides to the pano: Image->Guides->New Guide and specify horizontal or vertical, and at which pixel the guide should be. I normally slice my pano into 4 slices wide by 2 slices high, resulting in tiles of 2048x2048 each.
3) Once you've placed all your guides (in this case 3 vertical guides at 2048, 4096 and 6144 pixels and one horizontal guide at 2048 pixels), slice the image using Image->Transform->Guillotine. This will leave you with 8 perfectly square slices of your pano.
4) This step is where I battled a bit.... Saving the slices as JPG files from Gimp resulted in a pano with ugly horizontal lines in FS One. Saving them as DDS did not work either as I could not get the right settings to use with the DDS plugin which is freely available for Gimp. So my only option remaining was to save the tiles as uncompressed 24-bit TGA, but there are also problems doing this from Gimp. So, one way of working around this is to save all your tiles from Gimp with the correct names, but as BMP files.
5) For the next step I use a little freeware program called IrfanView (downloaded with all of it's plugins) as it is able to save in the correct 24-bit TGA format. Doing a batch conversion in IrfanView is quite straight forward.
6) Once you've got your tiles in TGA format, you should simply follow the rest of the FAQ as provided by the developers.
7) Our field, which was my first FS One pano experiment, is quite bumpy, and I liked the elevation file supplied with the Grasslands scenery in FS One, so I used that one. Taxiing using this ELE file looks quite realistic with the plane bobbing around as it moves over the scenery.

Hope this was informative.


Regards
Ryno