In signal processing applications, it is often necessary to extract oscillatory components and their properties from time-frequency representations, e.g. the windowed Fourier transform or wavelet transform. The first step in this procedure is to find an appropriate ridge curve: a sequence of amplitude peak positions (ridge points), corresponding to the component of interest and providing a measure of its instantaneous frequency. This is not a trivial issue, and the optimal method for extraction is still not settled or agreed. We discuss and develop procedures that can be used for this task and compare their performance on both simulated and real data. In particular, we propose a method which, in contrast to many other approaches, is highly adaptive so that it does not need any parameter adjustment for the signal to be analysed. Being based on dynamic path optimization and fixed point iteration, the method is very fast, and its superior accuracy is also demonstrated. In addition, we investigate the advantages and drawbacks that synchrosqueezing offers in relation to curve extraction. The codes used in this work are freely available for download.