Question: Minilab processing of digital files

[Joseph Tainter]

Sometime soon, perhaps at Christmas, I will get my wife a digital 
point-and-shoot. She would not want to do image editing or printing, 
just take the SD card to a minilab.

With most of my *ist D images, I have to use Photoshop's Auto Levels to 
get the image to the full light-level gamut. Otherwise the images are a 
bit muddy.

My wife is not going to do this with her images. So I wonder: If you 
take unprocessed jpeg images on a CF or SD card to a minilab, does the 
machine perform something like Auto Levels? Or do the images just come 
out muddy?

Wheatfield, Butch, or anyone?
Thanks,
Joe