I occasionally get questions about how I do some stuff in Photoshop, so here's a somewhat glossed-over tutorial (please note that this is not intended to be my best work, it's just a quick and dirty how-to). Hopefully it will be useful to someone. Perhaps someone who wants to learn some things in Photoshop, perhaps Dennis Kucinich.

And I'd like to point out that though I do have some Photoshop skills, and I am admitting that some images previously posted on this site may have been fabricated, that SI "Greatest Athletes" cover was totally real.

1. Find a suitable photo of a president.
   
2. Find/take a suitable photo of yourself. Taking a photo to fit the first picture makes the process way easier (and it often yields far better results), but is not always possible. For this example, I used an existing photo of myself from the holidays. Note that this photo goes against the cardinal rule of fake Photoshop pictures: NEVER choose a photo in which you are looking at the camera, because it makes it look super dee duper fake.
   
3. Legally obtain a copy of Adobe Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements)
4. Open Photoshop, open both images.
5. Using the magnetic lasso tool, roughly trace your head. You'll want to set a two-pixel feather first, so that the edges don't get choppy (the "Feather" option should be in the toolbar when the magnetic lasso tool is selected). Try to be accurate, but don't go nuts. We'll fine tune it later.
6. Press the letter "Q" on the keyboard to enter "quickmask mode."
   
7. When in this mode, use the paintbrush and eraser tools to do that fine tuning I mentioned 10 seconds ago. The red areas are the parts of the picture you don't want, the correctly colored areas are the parts you want. Post-fine tuning, it looks like this:
   
8. Press "Q" again to exit quickmask mode. Press Control+C (or Command+C on a Mac) to copy the selected area, then Control+V (Command+V) to paste it into the presidential photo.
   
9. You know what they say about guys with big heads, right? Right? Anyway, adjust the opacity of the new layer (with your head) so that you can see both heads at the same time.
   
10. Press Control+T (Command+T) to adjust the size of your head so that it roughly matches. Err on the side of making too big. You can make it smaller later without affecting the image quality. If you make it too small and have to make it bigger later, it'll get blurrier.
    
11. Now that you have the size roughly correct, hide the layer showing your head. Using the rubber stamp tool, "erase" the outer parts of the head you want to replace. Contrary to how it worked in "Back to the Future," erasing a person in the photo does not affect that person in real life.
    
12. Unhide the layer with your head. If necessary, do a little more shifting and resizing to get it to look right.
13. Fool around with Levels (Control+L) and Hue/Saturation (Control+U) until the tone and brightness of your head looks appropriate against the background.