Emma Watson's Missing Leg: What Happened to Emma Watson's Leg in the Burberry Photo?

Missing a leg? Who cares! Especially if you're Emma Watson, the famous Hermione, of "Harry Potter" fame.

The Internet is currently a-buzz and a-twitter (both figuratively and literally) over a recent ad by the modeling agency, Burberry, in which Emma Watson's right leg appears missing. Her thigh looks weirdly angled to one side and then the leg simply disappears.

It's not the first time a celebrity's photo for a magazine or ad has been goofed in touch-up, accidentally morphing the poor model into something more like an alien than a human. In fact, the Internet is replete with entire slideshows of Photohop goofs. Just type the words, "Photoshop disasters" into a Yahoo! search box for a long list of them.

It's probably not any comfort to Emma Watson to hear this, but anyone who has used Photoshop knows how easy it is to get so focused on the minor detail at hand ... er, I mean, leg ... that the big picture is lost. The big picture in this case being Emma Watson's missing right leg.

How did this happen? Not being the graphic artist who worked on the photo, I can't say for sure, but I can give a few conjectures. Although a number of people are guessing her leg was actually behind her brother in the photo, in my opinion, that's not the case. The leg looks abnormal if you try to picture it behind her brother ... whether standing naturally or kinked up behind him. No, if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the artist (who is probably looking at early retirement, regardless of his age) was working on either slimming Emma Watson's leg, or removing a blemish. Photoshop has a function that allows the artist to place a dotted line around the area of choice so that any work done within that dotted line doesn't slop over onto the rest of the photo. It's a handy option to use when airbrushing, changing the color and skin tone, etc. The problem is that if you accidentally click "cut" or "delete" without realizing it, you can totally remove whatever was within that area.

Take a look at the photo, and you'll see what I mean. Instead of trying to picture Emma Watson's leg contorted behind her brother, picture her leg looking like you would imagine, straight down to the ground because she's standing on it. Then run an imaginary diagonal line across the thigh and to the knee. Voila! You'll see from looking at the picture that's probably what happened. The artist ran a border that included a diagonal across her leg, and then deleted everything within the border.

What should Emma Watson do about her missing leg? Probably nothing. She's certainly getting her share of publicity out of it, and although having a missing leg isn't anything to write home about, it's her face and personality that fans know and love.

Embarrassing situations happen to the best of us, and it would be far better for Emma Watson to show strength of character and even make a joke out of it, than to whine and cry over such a goof. No doubt her fans will still love her, missing leg and all, and most people will forget about the gaffe in a week or too.

Sources:
Lindsay Robertson, "Emma Watson's Leg Goes Missing." OMG! from Yahoo!
Embedded links as listed above.
Personal experience.