Note: This technique creates not merely a 3D-like globe, but an actual stereoscopic image when viewed with 3D red and blue glasses.
Using surface textures from NASA and a bump map from another online source, I created a fully rotatable, 3D globe of the Earth in Photoshop CS4 Extended. It can be viewed or lighted from any direction. There is also a separate cloud layer I can turn on, edit, and move around. My master file is a very large image (6000 × 6000 pixels), more than ample to fill a full spread at 300 ppi.
