Until recently I never touched actions in Photoshop. But as with most great features, they are often overlooked thinking it is way to difficult or advanced. Well, using (and creating) actions is so easy that I now realize that they probably would have saved me already a lot of hours of repetitive work.

The final result of the action I created here, is an image of a screenshot with a little perspective, a background with some lighting effect and a little blur on the sides. Also a caption with title and description is added.
See the image below.

It is very easy to use this action.

• Download the action file Screenshot actions.atn and copy it in your Photoshop actions folder.
• Take a screenshot (print screen) of the screen you want to capture.
• Open Photoshop and create a new document. By default the size of the new document will match the size of the screenshot. You can see this in the ‘New’ document dialog box, where preset is set to clipboard.
• Paste the screenshot in your document. This will automatically put it on a new layer.
• Open the actions palette (windows->actions).
• Open the actions folder named ‘Screenshot actions’ and select the ’screenshot with caption’ action.
• Now click the little ‘play’ button on the bottom of the actions palette.
• Enjoy the action in action…

When the action has finished, you are able to change the text of the caption to whatever you want. The nice thing about actions is that it leaves you with all the layers that where originally created when the action was recorded. So you just select the text layer(s) and change to text. You can also change the font or colors.

To get a more in depth view on Photoshop actions, go to this great tutorial at My Ink Blog.