Pattern Suppressor replaced halftone dots with a basket weave pattern

I tried several times to get the Pattern Suppressor to remove a halftone dot pattern, following the steps in the tutorial exactly for greyscale. My results look worse than the original halftone. This happened when I first used a soft-edged round brush to mask the crosshairs and center star from suppression, and later, a hard-edged round brush. Can anyone suggest a fix? Would it help if the masking were 50% grey instead of black? 

BTW, after using Pattern Suppressor, the Photoshop image was converted to 32 bits per channel; you have to reconvert it to 8 before using an Artistic Filter.