What went wrong here?

Can anyone tell me what went wrong with these images?
They didn't look purple on my camera's display. I assume its one of two things. Either its one of the lights at the party messing up my camera or it has to do with my cf card. Unfortunatly I cut/pasted the images to my harddrive so the card is empty.

Also, would there be any way to recover these?


EDIT: as stated in my last post, I found out it is adobe bridge/camera raw that is the problem. Here is a screenshot from windows photo viewer.

Are the photos RAW format or jpg?

Those are taken in RAW

This looks like what windows does to an image when you do not have the latest version of a raw converter on your computer.

Is this the first time you have looked at photos from this camera on your computer? Which camera, and what OS?

Have you installed the raw converter that came with the camera and updated to the latest version?

Thanks for the reply Heath.
The camera is a canon 550D, I haven't installed the raw convertor that came with it yet (don't think I still have the disk ...). I'm using bridge to open my files and as far as I can tell its fully updated.
I've never had this issue before and plenty of the pics I took tonight are fine. I've taken over 20K pictures with the camera and this is the first time I had something like this happen.

I'm stumped.

There are a lot smarter people on this board than me, so I am sure someone will come up with a solution.

They look beyond recovery to make actual "good" shots but if you're just trying to have something to remember the moment, I would think that these can be cleaned up a little if they're raw. Try toning down the highlights and see how much of the blown out white detail is recoverable. They I'd play with the white balance and see what you can do for color. If you're taking a picture of people standing under colored lights, it's hard to judge what a "correct" white balance is though... even if you colors normal you'd lose some of the effect. You were the one who saw what the light was actually like there so part of it is to decide if you want it more "normal" or just correct to what you were seeing.

I suppose it's possible that there was something wrong but it really just looks like the result of photos taken in a difficult scenario... dark with uneven colored lighting, possibly wrong white balance, highlights blown out in an attempt to bring in background detail

It seems as though this would be caused by the CF card being at fault.

mosabi wrote in post #14227946
It seems as though this would be caused by the CF card being at fault.

That would be my guess too. I can't think of any other explanation, especially if the images on the LCD looked fine as the photos were being taken.

With the raw files there are a couple there that could easily be salvaged.

Try black and white....

Are these the products of one of those "funky" in-camera modes? I know that some cameras can be set to do over-the-top type processing...but I've never used them. And I don't know the 550.

Thanks for all the replies. I can't tell if what the pics looked like when I shot them (some had a very bad red cast over them from the lights, not sure about these). I took over 300 shots last night so I can't recall the conditions for all of them. I'll be shooting at that place again tonight, I'll pay some more attention and this time I'll leave the files on the card so I can transfer them again if I need to.
I'll most likely end up converting them to B&W to salvage the shots.

You don't have image editing turned on, but I took a look at a couple of these and set a Camera Raw template that seemed to make them look a little more normal at least.

These look a lot like some of the pictures I've seen posted on FACEBOOK. They had the same colors. If your camera has this ability, as cpam.pix mentioned above, did anyone have access to your camera? Just thought maybe someone played a late "April Fools" joke on you!