My 'educated' guess would be you deleted and recovered them from an SSD, because I see this a lot. If I am correct the issue has nothing to do with the file being RAW photos or JPEGs but with SSD and TRIM.
A modern OS sends a TRIM command to the drive when data is deleted. Contrary to popular belief, TRIM does not 'erase' data. A TRIM command in essence is a hint for the drive, that LBA sectors the OS passes to the drive are no longer of interest to the OS and the SSD can do with them as it pleases. Most modern SSD drives immediately remove these sectors from LBA space, and upon any request to read those sectors (for example by file recovery software) it returns sectors of zeros without even reading those sectors.
What can not be trimmed though is the meta data the file system has on the files! This is why file recovery and undelete type tools often still detect the files (names, size etc. all appear correct), adn as long as clusters allocated to the deleted file were not re-used it will even tell recoverability of the file is good. Once you recover the files, clusters are converted to LBA addresses and now the SSD comes into play, as it is those LBA sectors that were 'trimmed', and it will simply return zeros.
It is easy to check if this is the issue by opening a few of the recovered files using a hex editor like HxD. If you find the files willed with zeros, likely the associated sectors were 'trimmed'. No consumer type software tool can recover them.
HOWEVER: If files are vital, irreplaceable, etc., disconnect the drive from power immediately (the sooner the better)!! As long as drive receives power it can run background maintenance and garbage collection which means the sectors are truly erased at some point. As long as they weren't truly erased, using special equipment, a data recovery lab can possibly still reach those non LBA addressable sectors. This is btw also true for cameras that erase cards when you format the card in camera (Sony cameras for example) using the SD Card equivalent of the TRIM command.