We are interested in the foreground population of the Orion A cloud, in particular the foreground populations toward the ONC. To separate it from the background we used the optical properties of dust grains in the Orion A cloud to block the optical light to the cloud background. This is a very effective way of isolating the stellar population between Earth and the Orion A cloud, in particular when using the blue optical bands where dust extinction is most effective. To select the final sample of foreground stars we made two filtering steps guided by color-magnitude and color-color diagrams in the optical and infrared. In particular, we 1) used blue optical magnitudes and colors to define a reliable subsample of sources in front of the cloud, then 2) employed a near-infrared color-color diagram to reject sources affected by extinction (these are sources that are either young stars inside the cloud or background sources that are bright enough to be detected in the optical survey).