ReprojectImage is a program I wrote long ago to get general map projections into the equirectangular/Plate Caree projection. It's the tool that Ralf used in his tutorial to reproject his image to get it into FT and can be found at http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/ReprojectImage.zip if you'd like to fiddle with it. It's free to use.

GIMP or any other image manipulation tool will work well for manipulating the images. All I did in Photoshop was up the contrast of the base images and stitch together the two half images.

FT isn't a required part of the activity, it was just convenient way to do the globe projection. There are many other ways to do that part, including Wilbur (http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/software.html). Please note that I am in no way attempting to discourage you from buying a copy of FT.

CC3 doesn't do projections.

I would recommend working on the equirectangular projection if you can because going back and forth between projections causes some pretty significant distortions of the image near the pole.