Steve I reckon ankles injuries are the worst, apart from spinal.
There are programs specifically for creating mosaics and they do a much better job than CS - but they do have a learning curve.
Iceman and I both use Autopano Pro.
http://www.autopano.net
Hugin is free.
http://hugin.sourceforge.net
You can do whatever CS processing you need to do on the individual frames.
Assuming they were all shot with the same setup (f-ratio, camera) don't resize, just let the mosaic software do the rest.