I am not yet married, but my best friend has just got married and got her pics and I would say do it. If you decide to get the images and print yourself be very careful of the fine print and make sure you know what you are getting.
Some photogs will only provide you with a disk of low res pics so you can order prints from them. You can print these low res pics but they are poor quality. A friend of ours got their disk and the pics are already small enough to post straight to PS, so you can understand how little the resoltion is. The average res was under 100kb, whereas our other friends images were around the 3000kb mark!
If they do provide you with the high resoltion images, they won''t necessarily all be touched up and individually edited. If, cropping, effects etc are usually done when they go to make the album (not to mention, it''s a lot of work and if you are not buying the album, they have to make their money somewhere or not do the work).
Our friends disk are high res images, but not altered so you can print them and they look fabulous quality, you can see a difference in their professional album as the colours have been enhanced in some pics, and some minor alterations made. Unless you are a real neatfreak, you wouldn''t notice but there are subtle (and quite effective) differences in their album.
So, if you can get a disk and the copyright of all your images, that are high resolution and altered, enhanced whatever you want to call them, you can make a fabulous album at home. I made a quite cheap one recently from their pro pics with My Photobooks Australia and for $112 inc delivery for 60 pages, I was very impressed with the price and quality.
You will notice a vast difference in prices for photog packages that include the disks/prints only and not the album, and it has a lot to do with the stuff I just mentioned. A disk of low res, unaltered images wil be next to nothing, as they havn''t done anything with them yet and they are not really printable. High res images will be worth more, and the full high res, fully edited images will be worth more again.
As lovely as my little album I designed for myself of their wedding pics, nothing comes close to a professional album. It''s really a work of art, and a keepsake to pass down to your kids etc.
Good luck!!!