How to Mock-up a Cafe Racer Design Using Photoshop (for Wrenchers)

In this blog post I’m going to teach you three photoshop basic tools so by the end you’ll be able to turn this old BMW motorcycle into this custom cafe racer, using photoshop. So let’s get started.

Introduction

How’s it going readers? My name is Marcus and welcome to montmoto. I’m going to break this blog into 3 Parts.

In Part (1) I’m going to show you how to set up your Photoshop workspace as a blank canvas and step by step show you which buttons to click to get there.

In Part (2) I’m going to explain the concept of Layers in photoshop and how they are the only concept you really need to understand to get started doing any motorcycle mock ups.

And finally in Part (3) I’m going to show you step by step how to use our new knowledge to create a motorcycle that doesn’t exist in this world - you’re very own dream custom bike.

Part 1 - Photoshop for Wrenchers

As the name of this section suggests, this blog isn’t meant to be an exhaustive tutorial on how to use photoshop. It’s intended for someone who is comfortable with using desktop software and wants to do some very basic mock-ups and prototyping to create a custom motorcycle. 

Part (1) Photoshop Workspace Set-up

When you first open Photoshop the first thing you want to do is go toe ‘File’ and select ‘New’.  This will bring up this “New Document” interface. From here you can navigate to the ‘Web’ tab and select ‘Web Large’ as this one is HS with 1920 x 1080 aspect ratio. This next step is optional but instead of straining your eyes staring at a white screen all day, it’s pretty common practice to pick another color. On the right hand side of the New Document dialog box there is a ‘Background Contents dropdown menu. Pick any color you feel like. For this video I chose custom and picked a basic gray color. Once you’ve done that, hit the ‘Create’ button in the bottom right hand corner. And well done, we’ve set up our blank canvas and are ready to move on to Part (2).

Part (2) Photoshop Layers

OK, let’s just step out of Photoshop for a moment to learn a bit about Layers. They are a fundamental part of what we need to understand in order to be able to prototype our motorcycle. So here goes. 

A layer can be thought of as a sheet of clear transparent paper. In this little graphic this transparent sheet is called Layer #1 and right in the middle of it is I’ve drawn a nose. Now let’s imagine we placed another transparent sheet on top of this one, this time called Layer #2. On this layer I’ve drawn 2 eyes and a smiley mouth. Finally let’s imaging Layer #3 stacked on the very top. This one has the large circle for the outline of a face. 

When all these layers are stacked on top of each other, you can see the overall picture which is that of the smiley face, here in the bottom right hand corner. But what is the point of having each component of the smiley face on different layers? Well it frees you change out some of these layers later, so if you decided that you want the face to be a frowny face, you would turn Layer #2 with the smile off, and instead turn on a Layer that has a frown drawn on. This will be incredibly useful to us as we work on our motorcycle modifications later in the video.

Now switching back to photoshop we see that in the bottom right there is a tab in the UI called ‘Layers’. We’re going to cliche this and rename it to “Base Motorcycle”. At the very bottom of the screen there is a ‘Plus button’ to create a new Layer in the layer tab. I like to create 3 or 4 layers and rename them when I get started.

Part (3) Step by Step

Now for the fun part of Photoshop, here I’ve got a folder with various motorcycle photos. I have my own BMW R80/7 as I bought it, as well as some motorcycles I have Googled and saved over time. Now making sure that I have selected the ‘Base Motorcycle’ Layer I created (see this box on the lower right corner) I’m going to just crab the photo and drop it onto the workspace. Nice. Now we have a photo on our base layer.

Stepping out of photoshop again for a minute, what we’ve done here is add a photo to one layer, and the other layers are blank. I’ve show an incredible sketch of a motorcycle here with a tree in the background to represent that. But we only want the motorcycle, none of the background. So we’re going to need to use a photoshop tool to draw around the area we want to keep and then ‘Cut’ it out of the layer and “Paste” it onto a new layer. That means we just have the motorcycle on it’s own on a layer. The next step is to separate out the different components of the bike you want to be able to change out. So imagine we want to be able to change the rear wheel. We can select the wheel, ‘cut’ it from the layer it’s on and then ‘paste’ it onto it’s own layer, Layer #3 in this example. What this means is that we can now turn on an off any of these individual layers to only show the components that are on them. So if we turn off the original Layer #1 with the background, we’ll only see the other layers that have the motorcycle on it, as shown in the bottom right hand corner. 

Ok, back into photoshop to make this happen. We need to use the ‘Pen Tool’. It’s basically just used for marking around the area you want to select. So, again, always making sure you have selected the layer you want to make the selection from, we’re going to use the pen tool, zoom in, and click on the outline of the motorcycle the entire way around, like this. Here is some soothing music to watch this bit to. When you get the full way around close the selection by clicking on the first point you selected.

Great, back to the right hand box, to the Paths tab. You’ll see we have a new path there. You want to right click it and “Make Selection”. Then you need to press the “Command” + X key to cut the selection. What you are doing here is slicing through the base layer with the motorcycle. You now need to put it somewhere. Use one of the other layers you created earlier or create a new one with the plus layer box like we did earlier. Now to paste it you press “Command” and “P” buttons pressed together while in the new layer. You can press the little eyeball button in the Layer tab next to your base layer to turn it off, and you should see the old background disappear.

Let’s create a new document in the same way we did earlier. Now let's grab an image with a component we want to add to our motorcycle design. On this one I really like the back end and want to use the rear wheel and seat set up. Grab it, drop it into the document and use the same process with a pen to mark out what we want and then cut and paste it onto another layer in our Base Model. 

Finally I’m going to show you the last tool you need to be able to make this look great - the opacity slider. You can select a layer and slide the opacity to make the image more or less transparent. This helps with overlaying over the old motorcycle to drop it in just the right place.  Use the corners pulls to scale the image bigger or smaller.

So now you have all the tools you need to be able to cut images and save them to other layers and then turn the layers you want on and off. Playing around in photoshop you should be able to design your own custom cafe racer to be your dream build.

If you want to learn more on photoshop there are a bunch of tutorials on it here on youtube - it’s how I leared, and if you want another take on how to design your cafe racer, I’ve included For the Bold’s video on this very topic.

As always - good luck and have fun!