You do realize that, in a camera sensor, light is the signal, right? So the more light, the higher the signal-to-noise ratio, which means that yes it does have more information available to extract.

And yes, I quite realize that the input is (a). I'm guessing that in your display you are not seeing that there is a brighter spot in the middle of (a) corresponding to the whitewashed area in (c). Try maxing out your brightness if you're on a phone or laptop and you should see it. I can even make out letter shapes in (a) within this bright spot.