Through its well-recognised advantages and the availability of powerful new facilities, mid-infrared emission is becoming an increasingly used tool for the study of, amongst other things, the energetics of bolometrically luminous--and often dust enshrouded--galaxies. Although much progress can be made using observations of local, and hopefully well-understood, galaxies as templates for the interpretation of other observations, a more satisfactory approach is to make use of physically based models to directly compare to the observations.
I will present some such models, based on a comprehensive dust model and relatively simple radiative transfer, and illustrate their application to objects in the near-by universe with good multi-wavelength data including some new high resolution mid-infrared imaging. The implications for the interpretation of general mid-infrared observations will then be discussed.