We use the soft-photon approximation, formulated for finite pulses, to investigate the effects of the dressing pulse duration and intensity on simulated attosecond pump–probe experiments employing trains of attosecond extremeultraviolet pulses in conjunction with an IR probe pulse.We illustrate the validity of the approximation by comparing the modelled photoelectron distributions for the helium atom, in the photon energy region close to the N = 2 threshold, to the results from the direct solution of the time-dependent Schr¨odinger equation for two active electrons. Even in the presence of autoionizing states, the model accurately reproduces most of the background features of the ab initio photoelectron spectrum in the 1s channel. A splitting of the photoelectron harmonic signal along the polarization axis, in particular, is attributed to the finite duration of the probe pulse. Furthermore, we study the dependence of the sideband integrated signal on the pump–probe time delay for increasing IR field strengths. Starting at IR intensities of the order of 1TWcm−2, overtones in the sideband oscillations due to the exchange of three or more IR photons start to appear. We derive an analytical expression in the frequency-comb limit of the soft-photon model for the amplitude of all the sideband frequency components and show that these amplitudes oscillate as a function of the intensity of the IR field. In particular, we predict that the amplitude of the fundamental component with frequency 2!IR, on which the rabitt optical reconstruction technique is based, changes sign periodically