I will say that 99% of the pictures that I see, have the curtains open, at least the listings on the west side - which I think debunks the whole too much light distorting the room theory.

Lighting is what makes the place and you want to show how much natural light comes through to the house. I don’t think any home stager or agent would recommend having the picture with curtains drawn as their cover picture - maybe as part of a series of pictures, but even then, that’s quite rare. You only have a couple of shots to grab buyers’ attention so you want to capitalize on that.

And when I say post processing, I don’t mean photoshopping something in or those pictures whose saturation changes completely, you can still lightly touch on the exposure etc without it looking super touched up. Even professional photographers do it - and these people usually adjust the aperture, ISO as they are taking them.

Anyways - these are my two cents. The conclusion is, housing is still very unaffordable on the West Side so I should probably move elsewhere.