Ever Wonder What the Current Candidates Will Look Like in 8 Years?

April 28, 2008

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Do you ever find yourself wondering what each of the current candidates might look after four years of holding the most stressful job in the country? Or maybe in more general terms, like what kind of toll being the head of the worlds largest superpower may take on one’s body? Well thanks to the good people over at PopPhoto these questions now are now answered, below you will see digitally altered photos of John McCain, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton that show how they might look after four years of holding down the office of President, accompanied by an explanation of how PopPhoto achieved the aged look:
(click images to enlarge)

And this is how they did it:

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 Liquefy 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.

Is it bad that I can’t tell much of a difference between McCain’s “now” and “then” photos? I mean it appears to me that he goes from looking really old, too looking really really old.