Oops

It is no secret I'm not having a very good week.  To top it off, I'd read one of Ali Edwards' blog post about someone having issues printing with Photoshop - the same issue I've had with my PSE8.  The colours just come out wrong - in particular the skin tones become very pink/red, yet if I print the same photo using the computers default picture viewer I get a perfect result meaning the issue is the program not the printer.  Anyway, one suggestion was to check what format the files were saved as - either sRGB or Adobe RGB and match it to the setting in PSE... can you tell where this is heading?
So I open up the settings of the camera and start looking for anything to do with how the camera saves the visual images.  I opened up a tab called formatting and all it had was 'low-format' followed by a choice of either 'cancel' or 'format', and stupidly I pressed 'format'.  The screen went blank and said 'formatting' and that was the point my heart sank. Cancel! Cancel! Too late. Zip, nothing, gone.
At any other time I would have said, meh, it's ok.  I mean I had just downloaded and backed up the few hundred photos from camping last month so I had only lost the photos I had taken in the last week or so.  No biggie, except I had the photos from my parents' 50th Wedding Anniversary from last weekend and the photos I took on Tuesday when Sophie turned 2.  Not one, but two events I wanted to keep the photos from in the past week.
The lesson - I should never EVER touch settings I know nothing about.  In my defence I was searching for something I thought should be labelled 'format' but didn't realise the 'format' they were meaning was wiping the whole card.  I am slightly annoyed that if I want to delete all of my photos it displays a second prompt asking if I am sure I want to delete all the photos, yet to format the card there was no second warning.  I guess they assume no one is silly enough to press 'format' if they don't actually mean to.
I spent the most part of yesterday afternoon trying to download software to recover the erased files from the SD card.  Most of the free ones seem to be demo versions that are quite happy to find files but won't let you see them without paying for the full version, and of the 2 free versions that were totally freeware - one (Pandora) found all the photos I had deleted the week before but none of the newer files and the other (MjM) found nothing at all.  I'm just hoping none of them come with a bonus virus free of charge.
I don't think I can bring myself to pay to recover the files - something in the order of $80+ for 25 or so photos makes for some expensive shots - especially since I really only want about 5 of them.  Matt took some of Sophie on his iPhone on Tuesday so worst comes to the worst I will have lost the ones I took of my parents on the weekend and I'm sure I could get them to pose for some new ones - just without the celebration.
My last attempt is using Art Plus which I downloaded from the cNet website because it got some good reviews (and is free).  If this comes up with nothing then I will have to accept that the files are gone and move on.  I'll update if I have any success.

Update: I found the 'Art Plus' software to be the best. It found more files than the previous Pandora one and showed thumbnails of each photo rather than having to click on every single file to preview, so if this occurs to you it would be worth giving it a go. I didn't have any luck recovering the missing files possibly due to the fact I think what I did was a "low-format" which erases all files (and even though I immediately cancelled it, it was too late) where as a regular "format" just resets everything meaning the old files can be recovered until they are overwritten).  The 2000 files it did recover were not the ones I wanted, but it was worth a shot. Lesson learned. Moving on.