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If you have a digital camera, a printer and a PC, there's nothing to stop you getting stuck into graphic design. People with talent, skills and training may be better at it, but there's no reason why you can't have a crack at anything graphic designers can do. This is good news if you don't have the budget for a professional and you have sole responsibility for doing everything for your club or business.

The trouble is knowing where to start, and how to get your head around the unfamiliar technical concepts. In this feature, we provide you with enough tips, technical primers and creative advice to boost your graphic design expertise. We'll cut through the hardware and software specifications to get the right choices. We'll tell you what the manuals won't: how the professionals get results that look 'professional'.

So read on to find out all you need to know about the equipment you might want to use, the software you'll need, and the various printing and typesetting options available.

Choosing graphics software

You don't need expensive software to work like a pro. With a bit of knowledge you can pick up the right tools for under £100, or even for free.

There are two basic varieties of digital graphics: bitmap and vector. Bitmap images are made up of a grid of dots or 'pixels', short for 'picture elements'. A digital photograph is a bitmap; the camera's light-sensing chip itself consists of a grid of millions of cells,

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each of which records the amount of light falling on it. By measuring red, green and blue wavelengths separately, the colour of each pixel is recorded. In the 'Resolution and colour depth' section you can find out more about how colour is stored and how the number of pixels determines the image's resolution.

Bitmap-editing programs let you change the pixels of an image in all kinds of different ways. The commands you're most likely to need for digital photos are tonal adjustments, which apply mathematical operations to the values of all the pixels to alter the appearance of colour, light and shade. It could take you months to experiment with all the adjustments available, but in the 'Tonal correction' box we show you how to copy some commonly used professional methods in a few clicks.

The professional bitmap-editor is Adobe Photoshop, but you can get many of the same features in programs costing under £70. Photoshop Elements (www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin) has a lot of its big brother's commands, plus an easier-to-use interface and extra creative features. Another good choice is Corel Paint Shop Pro XI (www.corel.com/paintshop), which concentrates on providing a complete set of Photoshop-style advanced adjustments.

Quick on the draw

Vector graphics are very different to bitmaps. Made up of geometric descriptions, they're mainly used to define smooth, hard-edged shapes, as in drawings, diagrams and text characters. We explain more in the 'Working with vector graphics' section. Drawing and desktop publishing (DTP) programs are based on vector graphics, although they can work with bitmap images, too. You would normally choose drawing software to produce artwork or single-page documents involving more graphics than text, while DTP programs handle more complex text-based documents, from business stationery and brochures through to magazines such as Computer Shopper.