Thunder Bolt

I don’t know if this helps or not. But what I would do is try to blend the lightning bolt end pieces (if that makes sense) into the background kind of gradually. So rather than an abrupt beginning to where the lightning is super light I would blend those portions a little darker and fade them off into your background so they meld with the background color gradually. So if your lightest portion is value 1 (bright white with blue), create a value 2 (a tad darker) and end with a value 3 (darkest part of the lightning) then blend those back to your background (value 4)

Hope that helps. I like where you are going with it

You would see a bright flash around the "entry point" also too many bolts ....good effort