I tried using recuva to get some deleted photos and while most were unsalvagable there were a few that were marked as ‘excellent’ condition. I couldn’t preview them in recuva and when I downloaded them they wouldnt open either. I tried Stellar photo repair and that didnt work, I also tried viewing them in irfanview but it just said incorrect file format. Are these at all salvageable?
If Irfanview can't display them then personally I'd regard them as unrecoverable.
The fact that you also used a paid for tool with no success would tend to confirm that.
I believe that 'Excellent' in Recuva just means that it has found the correct number of bytes to be recovered, so there is an 'excellent' chance of recovering whatever those bytes contain.
But it can’t know if those bytes contain the ‘right’ data or not; the only way to find that out is by recovering the file and then trying to open it.
The old question is, is your drive an SSD?
The state of Excellent means that no data clusters have been overwritten - yet. Whether the contents of those data clusters is what you want is another matter (which is perhaps just a rephrasing of what Nukecad said).