After giving it some thought, I thought I would show a before and after of a photograph as an example of how much I may work on a particular photo. The below is probably about the most I would do. In this particular case, I intentionally underexposed the photo as I wanted the flower to really stand out against a dark background. This was not that difficult as this was taken just after noon and so it was very bright. By underexposing the photo to bring the brightness down on the flower, it darkened the water in the background. Knowing I could increase the exposure of the flower in post processing, I allowed the original to be dark. However, I felt in the original there were some distracting stems and so they were mostly removed by burning in a layer and making the background even darker. This is something that would not have been that difficult in a traditional darkroom.
So to reduce the amount of work needed, I simply underexposed the photo. This is one of two ways I generally create my photos, this way by underexposing to create a darker background to remove distractions, or you will notice that I take the opposite approach and overexpose my photos in order to blow out the background and allow it to go to white. Generally this is also used to eliminate background distractions but also depending on the direction of the light, it allows me to properly expose for my subject so as to not allow it to appear as a silhouette.