I haven't deleted my Version 1 yet - I'd still like to hear from Jeff or Andrew (see my question above) if the new and old versions are the same under the hood (i.e., with identical settings for capture and output sharpening with both versions, will sharpening be the same?).
No, V 1.x and V 2 are different. It's subtle...First off, you get the ability to do an Auto Edge Width with 2 you can't do with 1. And in Output Sharpener 2, you really only choose Matte or Glossy and PKS 2 does the auto sharpening based on the image resolution...
The one thing that did surprise me with the new version was that all image captures over 8 mp get the same capture sharpening (high res). I was thinking that with some of the new cameras exceeding 20 mp there would be another level of capture sharpening added to the menu (higher res?).
We tested that...up to the 60MP Phase P65+ back and found that unlike output sharpening that is completely dependent upon PPI resolution, the edge masks for captures above that kinda magic mark of say, 10-12MP, the sharpening works fine.
The only thing I would say is test it yourself and give us feedback...several of our testers were using PKS 2 for capture sharpening P40+, P65+ and Hasselblad captures...their feedback was positive.
For my own work, I tend to do a lot of stuff in Camera Raw or Lightroom (kinda have to keep up with both applications–particularly Camera Raw since I do a book on that).
So for my workflow (and since I'm pretty good at using the ACR sharpening controls) I tend not to use PKS 2 capture sharpening unless I'm doing something like a pano merge.
For any serious printing, I'll pop the images into Photoshop (using from Lightroom) and do retouching and soft proofing corrections there. Most of the time I prefer to print out of Lightroom and I'm perfectly happy to output sharpen there. If I need to print out of Photoshop, I'm perfectly happy to do the output sharpening in PKS 2.
The primary reason I like using LR's output sharpening is workflow. I can render a master image TIFF without worrying about resizing and resampling until I go to print. In LR's templates I've got all my standard print sizes and paper types. I size the cell in the print to give me the margins I want.
Often I'll let the image resolution fall to whatever the PPI would be for that print dimensions...however, of late (particularly with P65+ captures printed on EFP) I actually use Lightroom's interpolation to go to 720PPI. Lightroom's interpolation is better than in Photoshop's. It's an adaptive blend of different Bicubic variants based on the resampled size.
By keeping my master image in Lightroom without output sharpening applied, I can cut WAY down on the number if file iterations I need to keep track of compared to a Photoshop workflow where I need to spawn off a different file for each size print I make.