This is a simple example of the two main types of editing I do. With the coyote photos (before and after - low quality unfortunately), my goal was to clean up some of the stems in front of the face or other key areas, and try to sharpen a low quality image the best I could. I see this as very conventional editing.
With the dragonfly photos (before and after), the before image was 95% OK except for the bright spots that I removed. Judging how many and to what extent I should suppress "spots" like these is important to me, but not something I see discussed anywhere. It would be interesting to read some opinions on that.