If it's not at least halfway decent to start with, I don't bother. "Garbage in, garbage out," as they say. But a good image can be made better by processing. It's worth doing.
Every one of my images gets some degree of post processing attention.
Understand completely. I discovered over 10 years ago the benefits of capturing images in RAW file format as opposed to JPG file format. My cameras, when converting images to JPG format, can’t compete with my brain as an image processor - neither are their in camera processors as powerful as the processors in my computers. Shooting in RAW format has provided me more flexibility with image production to make decisions on how a final image should look. Here are samples of some of my first RAW to JPG conversion, from back in 2007…