Okay nodes. You can recreate it all but with nodes everything is a just a piece. So if you want to soften the matte you add a blur node, to desaturate add a saturation etc.
Your matte is black and white correct.
One your matte is blurred feed it into a alpha blend
Node to the mask input.
Now you can start connecting you color, contrast, blur, curve nodes into another input of the alpha blend node.
That should do the trick. I might have some terminology wrong im away from the color station.
Remeber to keep your node tree connected to the output.