Usually nanosecond pulsed laser processing of metal is mainly affected by the thermal ablation. Many studies of the theoretical analysis and modeling to predict the laser ablation of metal are suggested on the basis of the photothermal mechanism at higher laser fluence. In this paper, we investigate the etching depth and laser fluence of laser ablation of copper foils and propose the simplified SSB Model(Srinivasan-Smrtic-Babu model) to study the photothermal effect of nanosecond pulsed laser ablation. The experimental results show that the photothermal ablation of the 355nm DPSS $NdYVO_{4}$ laser is useful to process the copper thin foils.