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You definitely need to have a decent background knowledge of tuning to be good and be comfortable doing this.
You need to have some sort of electronics that can control either fuel or fuel and ignition.
There are piggybacks(SAFC, Emanage...) which are the low end and usually conisder band-aids for tuning, these modulate signals that come from factory sensors and send out new signals to change the performance of the engine.
Then there are ROM tunes(Enthalpy, JWT...) these are tunes created by a tuner who has a pretty good idea of what kind of fuel and ignition map you would need for a specified setup. You take your factory ECU and ship it to them and they flash a new 'tune' onto your ECU after giving them information such as MAF, Injectors and Turbo...
There are also stand-alones(AEM, Megasquirt...) these are ECUs that come with software and are 100% fully tunable by you or a tuner. You can change a multitude of settings and control things such as fans and so forth.
Most tuning with any of these three items requires a Wideband Air to Fuel ratio gauge and you go to a shop with a Dyno and you make runs and adjust the fuel and timing maps to a desired Air to Fuel ratio level to achieve more power.
You can also tune on the street, this is not near as reliable, nor does it generally have as good of results. However not all drivability hiccups can be removed from just tuning on a dyno.
You will NOT need a tune when you do a swap. You can keep the factory ECU, Injectors and MAF. The only time you need to get a tune is when you change Injectors, MAF, Turbo or ECU.
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