One last suggestion. While I know you are an accomplished matte artist, this suggestion may help others reading this thread as well.

In CG, the concept known as 'Specular Bloom,' which creates a blurred glow around the highlights in a photo. It's known in Vue as Lens Blur in post effects. I prefer doing it myself in photoshop and combine it with some other known techniques regarding film photos.

I'm leaving off the film grain component of this discussion as that's a whole topic in itself.

Consider the image below. It's a straight render from Vue w/out any post in Pshop.

After opening it in Photoshop, I'll duplicate the image so I'm always working on a copy of the original. First I'll adjust the color saturation, either up or down just a bit. Usually it's down a couple of points. Then I'll tweak the levels by changing the Input Levels to something like:  23, 239 with a gamma setting of 0.85. This effectively makes the original a bit darker and higher contrast, much like film behaves.

Then I duplicate the layer, and apply a Gaussian Blur filter of around 10 (for 1K image- larger for higher rez, smaller for lower rez) and apply a mode of 'screen' to the layer. Then, many times I'll duplicate the new blur layer and blur it once again with the same settings.

The second image below represents this technique. As you can see, the contrast is bumped-- as in film, and there's now a more blurred halo around highlight areas.

Hope this helps.

This process also helps reduce noise.