You need to give us a full run down on your workflow.

Doing what your doing so far doesn't sound optimal at all.

Regards, Smooth

I have been shooting in JPG fine with the Nikon D300 & 10.5 lens to reduce processing time. I shoot in brackets of 5, 6 around +T. So this gives me 35 images per scene.
I stitch with PW5 in the "bracket exposure" mode in order to stitch all 5 brackets at the same time. Stitch all scenes in tour.
Take each scene into Photomatix Pro to merge. Save image.
Import all stitched/merged scenes into Photoshop Elements5. Work my magic, remove tripod on some but not all images. Save all images back to my folder.
Take the images that I did not remove the tripod back into PW5 to add cap. Save back to folder.
The issue is that the images I did not take back into PW5 remain at 4Kx2K at 5 to 6+MB. The images I did take back into PW5 (for the cap) remain at 4Kx2K but have been reduced to 1 to 2 MB each.
As you can imagine at 5 to 6+ MB each this makes my tour huge.
I guess the question is, how to keep my images at 4Kx2K with a manageable file size but retain as much quality as possible?
I have viewed a lot of tours that look great and load fast, how so?
I know a lot of you shoot in RAW (and I do sometimes) but time wise that just is not feasible at the rates I get around here.

Any and all help is appreciated........

I just did a quick test. I merged 5 pano's averaging 2MB each and the finished pano was 5.72 MB. I took this into PS E5 and did 3 save as.
1. quality 3 was 664 KB.
2. quality 6 was 1.24 MB
3. quality 12 (highest) was 5.73 MB the same as the finished pano out of Photomatix. All images remained 4Kx2K.
I understand that PS is not the best way to reduce file size, so where do I go from here.
I looked at the 2 suggestions from Smooth in my other post on this subject but from what I could gather reducing the images would actually reduce the size of the image. I could be wrong but I don't think this is what I need to do....

Did you try comparing the same image sizes once you have passed them through File > "Save for Web" rather than using "Save As"? This strips away some of the metadata and reduces overall file size (maybe this was mentioned earlier..).

Any more suggestions on this subject??

Jerry,

Do you need a final pano that is 4000 x 2000?  This seems large to me for  real estate work.  Also, in PS CS2 I get the same warning when using the save for web feature if the file is large.  You can hit save anyway and it saves the file.  Do not have Elements so not sure if you can override but worth a go.

Good Luck,
TTurner