poita said:

I thought that even with that soft filter applied, it looked sharper in most places than your original image. I was doing a quick compensation for the quick and dirty processing I did which created some sharpening, so I had to tone it back down again when done. Film does this automatically, it is much softer than the neg.

If doing the grade properly (i.e. if I spent more than a few seconds on it) then the filter wouldn't be needed at all.

The trick is never to blow out the highlights at all, this might not be possible with what you are using, but any decent grading software will allow you to tweak the highlights without blowing them.

Basically you want to increase the dynamic range in the skintones, bring up the highlights that should be there, typically along the bridge of the nose, the sparkly highlights in the eyes, the whites of the eyes and the gloss of the lips and hair etc.

This gives a much more natural and alive look with depth, rather than the flat leathery faces of the BD. The film prints have much brighter highlights than the BDs do.

It would be really helpful to me if you could regrade this shot below to look exactly how you think it should look:

Then using your regraded shot as a reference, I can work out how to achieve what you've done by isolating highlights. I'm pretty sure its possible with the program I use to isolate highlights if I experiment a bit with the different settings but I need an end point, ie. your regraded shot, in order to be able to experiment and work out how to get there from my current settings.