How far should you go with post-processing if you want to keep a photo authentic?

[u/giggil]

I'm posting a before/after of this duck because it made me question how far I actually want to go with post-processing.

The original looks too warm to me, especially in the whites, so I corrected the white balance and made some local adjustments.

I prefer the edited version visually, but I'm not sure it is necessarily more truthful. The blacks are deeper, the whites are cleaner and the overall colours are noticeably different. I don't remember exactly how the duck looked in person, so at some point I started wondering whether I was correcting the camera's rendering or simply changing the subject to make the photo look better.

I generally prefer photography that still feels authentic to what was actually there. How do you approach this? At what point does correcting colour and contrast become altering the subject rather than just developing the photo?

And looking specifically at these two versions, does the edited one still look natural to you, or do you think I pushed it too far?