Hi Dave - nice towers! They remind me of my years in Horwich, near Rivington Pike.

I use a Canon DSLR (EF-S 70D) with an 18mm-135mm kit lens and always shoot in raw. Raw contains all the digital info in the shot, and it can be manipulated to alter colour, hue, saturation, lens distortion, etc., with a program called Lightroom. When you shoot in JPG, the camera software creates the photo according to its preset algorithms. With Lightroom, you create the JPG yourself.

The important thing with digital photography is to remember that the picture quality depends more on the lens than on the number of megapixels. If the lens is crap, no amount of megapixels will compensate. I have a Fuji Finepix compact - only 6 megapixels but a great lens - and it shoots good JPGs (but not raw).