Creating Cut-outs in Photoshop

For this spread I'm going to be using character cut-outs of Doc and Marty, the main characters in the Back to the Future series. To do this I will be using Photoshop to remove the background before importing into InDesign.

 

This is the image I started off with. It should be fairly easy to extract the characters from this image. I'm using the highest resolution version I could find. I think it was 1024 x 768

 

After opening the image in Photoshop I used the polygonal selectional tool to draw around the outline of the character.

Then I took that selection and cut it. I made a new Photoshop file and pasted the cut-out into it. Even though I had a blank background, in order to make the rest of the image transparent I had to first delete the layer underneath so that there were just the hatched markings left.

And I saved it as a PNG file since they're able to save transparent layers in image files.

 

I did the same for Marty. Now I have two cut-outs that are ready to be imported into InDesign when I need them.