Nearly giving up with this recovery! Please help! =[

Firstly, apologies if this is in the wrong section, it involves a HD with moving parts but also recovery of a disk image so i wasn't sure.

I'm on Mac, and i've managed to delete an encrypted sparse disk image (128-bit AES encryption) from my internal HD.

Now, i've managed to recover the disk image by using Stellar Phoenix, it has the same file size as it did previously but when i try to open it i'm getting an alert to say "corrupt image".

I feel like i might be out of luck, can anyone shed any light on a possible solution for repairing the spares disk image?

p.s. This stuff is really out of my league, i'm a photographer for a living, computer science is really not my forte! Apologies if i haven't explain the problem effectively.

Cheers,
Dan