Ever wanted to be a professional thief? Cracking open safes, robbing banks? Not such a good idea, but why take the risk of getting caught if you can fake it?   I'm going to teach you how to make a nice laser cut on a metal surface, with all the effects you get when you do it. To keep it realistic, I'm not going into creating the laser itself - In reality you can't actually see the laser, so why bother making it?
 

Step 1: Start with a basic metal background. If you don't know how to make one, take a look here. This effect works best on light metal surfaces. You can follow this tutorial with any size canvas, but it's best to start out with a big one of at least 500x500 pixels.

Step 2: Make a new layer and call it 'Cut'. Whip out your elliptical marquee tool and make a circle in the centre of your canvas. Then go to Edit > Stroke and use these settings:

Width: 3px
Color: Black (#000000)
Location: Inside

After that you should delete a part of your circle using the eraser tool to create the illusion that you are still busy cutting your shape.

Note:  With a few modifications, this can also work well with simple text, vectors, etc - but I'll leave figuring that out up to you...

Step 3: To give your cut a little bit of depth, we're going to add a few layer styles to the 'Cut' layer. Right-click on the layer in the layer palette and choose Blending options. (Click on the image to the right to see all the settings).

Your cut probably doesn't look anything like a nice and crisp cut a laser would make, but we're going to fix that by setting the fill of the layer to 0%. Look better? Thought so... ;)

Step 4: The next step is to enhance the realism of the cut. When metal gets really hot, it melts. That molten metal needs to go somewhere and, in our case, it stays on top of the cut. So let's set it all up.

Start by tweaking your Brush settings. Select the brush tool and press 'F5'. Your Brush Presets will pop up. Use the following settings:

Brush Diameter: 12px
Spacing: 17%

Refer to the image on the right for the rest of the settings.

Step 5: Add a new layer and call it 'Residue'. Now start brushing along your cut as I'm doing on the right. Because we tweaked our brush settings, this is extremely easy. You can move your mouse along the circle and the brush itself will do the rest.

Drag this layer beneath your 'Cut' layer and enter the Layer Styles once again by right clicking on you layer and choosing Blending Options. Click on the image to the right to see all the settings that you should enter. After you applied all the settings, set the Fill of your Residue layer to 0%.

Step 6: You're finished with your cut! But it still looks a bit dull, doesn't it? Let's liven it up a little bit with some sparkles and lots of imagination.

I used some of the sparkle brushes that can be found in the Biorust Graphic Resources. Just experiment a bit with different versions and you'll get the hang of it soon enough.


Note: This technique doesn't work very well on small objects like miniature text, detailed vectors, etc.