The Candidates: How will they look in four years?

A trip through the Pop Photo Time Machine.

By The Editors on December 16, 2008

How-To

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The Presidency really takes its toll; just look at how George Bush has aged. To see how the current candidates would fare after a term in the Oval Office, we put them through the Pop Photo Time Machine. See our Photoshopped before and afters of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama.

Mouse-over any of the images to see how the candidates may look in 2012.

Aging takes time, even when you make it happen artificially with software. Each candidate took about four hours of retouching. To mimic the ravages of time, we did the following:

- Used the Burn and Dodge tools to deepen wrinkles and paint in age spots.

- Cloned the eyebrows and moved them lower.

- Used the Liquify filter to hollow out cheeks, make jowls, thin out lips, and enlarge ears and noses.

- For Clinton and Obama, brought in forehead wrinkles from separate photos and used the Match Color tool to blend them in.

- For Obama, painted in gray hair on top of his current hair; for Clinton, desaturated with the Sponge tool to make her grayer.

Bush 2000 photo by Archie Carpenter/drr.net

Bush 2008 photo by Ron Sachs/drr.net

More Photoshop tutorials can be found in the Digital Toolbox archive.

John McCain, Photo by Remi Ochlik/drr.net

Barack Obama, Photo by Kevin Dietsch/drr.net

Hillary Clinton, Photo by David Paul Morris/drr.net