I agree that the average person who owned a camera wouldn't have done this as a matter of course. Honestly I was thinking more of the "portrait studios", rathe

I agree that the average person who owned a camera wouldn't have done this as a matter of course. Honestly I was thinking more of the "portrait studios", rather than the home-shooter. Though I guess in teh early days of cameras there were a lot of people who did their own development at home, in ad-hoc darkrooms. Maybe they didn't edit so much, but it was within their means, and I'm sure it was more commonly done than we'd suspect.