Need Help with a lightning photo

I shot this lightning strike a few weeks ago and noticed the water spots I had on my lens, I dismissed this thinking that this would be an easy fix, I have tried cloning, the patch tool, healing brush, masking out the lightning strike to deal with just the background layer to no avail.
I have tried isolating the individual channels and treating this as lens flare, but that won't work either.

The light coming off the strike is graduated, which makes it difficult to find a good source point to clone or heal from.

Please post the steps and tools used to fix it, so others can also learn from this.

Thanks for the help in advance.

Allan

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i love the photo. can't help with the pp, sorry.

No easy solution but setting the opacity on the clone stamp to 10% and slowly building up the colour along the edge of the bolts then using the healing brush once you've separated a bit of water mark from the bolt works quite well just takes time.

This took 15 mins and could be a lot better with 15 more.

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nice shot Allan and nice fix Hank

Yes, nice fix and information on how it was done.

Wow, Hank that is awesome, so with the opacity slider so low did you just build up using layers?, where did you clone source from to get reliable data. I had tried the healing brush but if I got too close to the lightning bolt it would drag in the light intensity of the bolt, but I have since read that the brush needs to be a sharp edge for healing and a soft edge for cloning.

Thank you taking the time to do this

Good job, Hank. Some of the "Clone" Tools work better than others for different parts of the image. Where there is a sharp border between colors, I've found that it's easier to select an area & clone within it to keep the colors from mixing.
Selecting areas in PS.

Samdiver74 wrote in post #10748985
Wow, Hank that is awesome, so with the opacity slider so low did you just build up using layers?, where did you clone source from to get reliable data. I had tried the healing brush but if I got too close to the lightning bolt it would drag in the light intensity of the bolt, but I have since read that the brush needs to be a sharp edge for healing and a soft edge for cloning.

I used a large area of dark sky as the source with "aligned" off and just built up the colour with progressive brush strokes. I rarely use a hard edges brush for anything and for this it was set to have around 2 pixels worth of softness at the edge.