Make fireplace grout pattern dark.

[Rich54]

Nice job @IamSam. Can you explain what you did? I tried this one myself, but didn't post it. Mine came out ok, but yours is much cleaner and more consistent.

Here's what I did:

• Fill the entire shape of the tiled wall with black.
• Apply Blend-If to allow the black to appear only if the underlying layer is lighter than about 42. (The existing charcoal-gray tiles have an RGB value of approx. 40,40,40. With Blend-If set at 42, anything lighter than 42,42,42, such as the grout, will be darkened by my black layer, but the tiles themselves remain unaffected.)
• Mask away the fireplace grill and the ceiling fan.

There is a lot of JPEG noise surrounding the grout lines, which I didn't attempt to clean up. That noise affected the quality of my method.

 

[IamSam]

Rich, I'm so sorry! I thought I had replied to your question, but somehow it got lost in the transition!!

I actually cheated this effect by recreating the bg and pattern and then masking.
For the pattern, I matched one "cell", duplicated them over and over and moved until I had them all filled in. Took less than a minute.
Once the pattern was full, I then recreated the bg by matching the color and gradient.
Then I masked using the Pen Tool.

The one thing I would do differently if I had to do over again, is that I would have made the first cell of the pattern a smart object before copying. This way, I could have added slight effects to all!

 

[Rich54]

Rich, I'm so sorry! I thought I had replied to your question, but somehow it got lost in the transition!!

I thought you didn't like me anymore .

I figured you must have done something like recreating the pattern. Yours was so clean and perfect and had none of the JPEG noise.

Thanks