I created this lightning effect and set the values to what I thought looked best to me. Then I added a background in maya (on a plane) to set up a good perspective, but when the lightning is in front of the background, it gets way too bright and has a huge glow. The only way to disable this is to turn the glow almost all the way off, but then it defeats the purpose. The first image is the effect settings.

I deleted the only light in my scene (direction light) and that seemed to take the glow off the background, but then I have no lights

So is this most likely a problem with my directional light, my lightning effect, or my background plane (shader)? Any ideas what settings I should change?

Thanks in advance.