DVD Cover - Band Image

So my original idea was to take a photo of a made up band, with the lead singer holding the iconic grenade logo. However, I have decided to change this idea and instead find a professional photo of the actual band online, as I thought this would look better because for the promotional video I am now going to use actual footage from the band's live shows, so it would look weird having different people on the DVD cover to in the video.

Therefore, I have found a photo of the band on a photoshoot for their promotion of their Latest album, Shallow Life. Here is the photo...

I got this image of the band's Facebook page. This is the URL: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=316338182343&set=a.55728832343.79434.24803092343&pid=3981465&id=24803092343

I chose this image because it showed a clear picture of al of the band members. Plus they are all wearing blacks and reds which keeps to the colour scheme I have already used on the DVD cover. 

I pasted the image into Photoshop, making sure I created a new layer called 'Band Image', so that I could cut around the image to get rid of the white background , so that I just have the band and nothing else. I started to do this to begin with with the 'Rectangular Marquee Tool' tool and pressing 'delete', which I used to cut big blocks of the white background out before I moved on to the finer outline of the image. 

Once I had got rid of majority of the background, using the 'Rectangular Marquee Tool' tool, I went round the image adding points round the outline, using the 'Pen Anchor Point' tool, getting as close to the edges as possible. After setting numerous points around the entire image and then deleting the rest of the white background, I had nearly got rid of it all, apart from the white which was very close to the main image. 

To delete the rest of the white, I added a 'Mask' to the image. I then changed the colour of the pen to white so that I could go round the image, changing the size of the brush by using the square brackets. I then went over the white parts, and instead of deleting the white, it faded it so you could see the original background of my DVD cover. This was very helpful because I sometimes accidentally went over the band instead of the white, so I just had to change the colour of the brush to black and go over it again to get the part of the original image back again. However, this was very time consuming and fiddly to do, but the end result was worth it.