[Question] How to select and extract lightning?

[Mick_STP]

Hey all - I took a lot of lightning photos the other evening as a thunderstorm passed by, and I decided I want to take one wide angle photo of the landscape in front of me and take just the lightning bolts from the other shots and composite them into the broader view. Where I'm struggling is how to select just the lightning bolts... they are very skinny, so there's not a lot to work with as far as using a quick selection tool or magnetic lasso tool. And they change color and brightness between the clouds and the ground, so you can't use a color selection, etc.

I learned how to make luminosity masks but I don't see where you can pick the threshold of pixels to select (it uses 50% automatically). I've tried Threshold Adjustment Layers, but that doesn't work well on lightning. I've tried simple masking with a brush but it's very (very) tedious, and I'm sure there has to be a better way. Isn't there a way to select just the pixels with brightness between X and Y values? And I need to remove as much sky as possible, because the color of the sky changed dramatically as the storm passed through, and also as I played with different shutter speeds.

Willing to try anything, I have a couple dozen of these to extract and composite. Posting one of the lightning shots below in case anyone feels like demonstrating instead...  Google has failed me, as almost every hit involves how to add lightning in Photoshop, not how to select it.

Thanks for any advice!

Mike

[Chuck Uebele · Accepted solution]

Use curves to turn the bg black or nearly black. they use screen mode or lighten mode on the lightning layer.

[Mick_STP]

Oh man, that's so much easier than everything I was trying. It takes a bit of tinkering to remove some chromatic aberration sometimes, but it's getting the job done!! I'll post a copy when the photo is done.... thanks!    

[Bojan Živković]

Try with individual channels, in the example above Red channel is most contrast channel. Duplicate channel with most contrast then play around with Image > Adjustments > Levels or Image > Apply Image / Calculations while using blend modes like Multiply, Overlay, Soft Light...

I know I am too late but animation was done so let me post it to support my answer.

[Mick_STP]

Thanks for the tips, guys. I came up with the following image, I think I like it, I try to remember that "Perfect is the enemy of good"...