Question: is it possible to take a picture of your newborn child, and use an aging program to make him look older in a picture, then put the picture on the mantlepiece so he thinks he's a time traveller?

Ageing software uses a whole heap of different tricks to guess how someone will look when they are older. The problem is that it gets harder to predict how they will look, the more you try to age them, and it’s more difficult with children because their faces changes so much.

You could probably make an accurate predication of how I might look in 5 years, but the changes that an newborn’s face undergoes to reach adulthood are huge and predicting them would be very difficult. The other thing is you can’t predict what might happen to the childs face during that time. For example, if they break their jaw playing footy and need it reconstructed it could chance how their face ages.

I would think that if you aged a picture of a newborn using software that there would be only a small chance that it would really resemble them as an adult. You would probably have just as much success by using a picture of their grandfather or grandmother to convince them they are a time traveller.