The true water-colorist allows the watercolor to do most of the work. The true photographer allows the lens and the film to do it. Keep on blazing on, push the medium to its max, learn everything you can about the process and don't let the critics get you down. An even better way would be to add another Layer and do your tinting on that layer, not touching the real image below. Also the benefit of doing it on another layer is so if you screw up, it's easy to go back without having to revert to saved.
Soft focus is so easy to do.
Then make a duplicate layer of the image. On the duplicate layer, Gaussian blur the hell out of it. The amount depends on the overall size and DPI of the image. A bigger image needs more blur. But for a reference say an image that's 1024x768 needs a blur radius of around 5 or 6.