Blue tree path Smoky Mountains: Are there really blue trees in the Smokies?
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Jun 10, 2025
There's yet another wild rumor making its way across the Internet about the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. It involves an image of what appears to be a park trail surrounded by blue and purple trees. It usually appears alongside the caption: "Blue Tree Path in Tennessee". I first happened upon the spectacle on Pinterest. And there's no doubt that it's a beautiful image. But is it real? Read More: https://www.thesmokies.com/blue-tree-path/ Disclosure: This blog (and YouTube channel) will occasionally contain affiliate links, which means we may receive a small commission on a purchase without additional cost to you.
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hey guys it's morgan here with the
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smokies.com and today we're going to do
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something a little bit different we're
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actually going to
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address an internet rumor about the
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smoky mountains that's
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currently trending on pinterest
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[Music]
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all right so one of my many jobs here at
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the smokies.com is actually
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i'm being a graphic designer and a photo
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editor
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um and so when we found this little
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internet rumor trending last week i
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thought
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okay this is our chance to kind of you
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know play around with a little bit of
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photoshop
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and show you guys exactly how these
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kinds of rumors get started
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so here's how we discovered the rumor
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originally check this out so we were
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looking around as we always do
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um on the internet for things that are
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trending here in the smoky mountains
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and one of the things that we noticed
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was a popular search term for blue trees
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and a quick search for blue tree smoky
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mountain
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we'll pull up plenty of results
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as you can see right here blue tree path
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i believe
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even more yes blue tree path
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and you see a lot of different people
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are sharing this
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image of what looks like this mystical
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scene
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of an orange path and blue and purple
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trees
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which sounds amazing this person's
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saying is their total bucket list item
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um but of course the big question is is
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it real
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right so we're gonna do two things a day
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first of all i'm gonna break your heart
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right i'm gonna tell you this is not
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real
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um i've pretty much grown up around the
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smoky mountains my entire life
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and um i've never seen any blue trees or
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orange paths but second of all i thought
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we'd have some fun and i'm gonna show
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you
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about how this artist probably achieved
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this photoshop
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um look all right so we're gonna do so
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by starting out
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we're gonna start by opening photoshop
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so i'm just going to open photoshop and
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i was actually able to
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find the original image
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online so this is basically what the
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original image looks like right
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it looks like a nice autumn scene it
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might have actually had some
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additional color enhancement done to it
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but more or less it looks much more like
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a normal walking path with maybe some
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autumn coloration on the trees
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and then of course you have the
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photoshop version on your left with all
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those really fun you know blue and
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purple colors right
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so to achieve this look or look very
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similar to it what we're going to do
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is we're going to duplicate this layer
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that i have in layer one
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and i'll try to move pretty quickly for
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all of you people who aren't quite
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as nerd-tastic about photoshop as i am
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i was noticing that the yellows became
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blue um that the reds became
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green that the greens and the greens
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became purple so i was
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noticing there was a lot of
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complimentary color action going on so
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i knew that if i use the invert tool it
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would
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get us most of the way there so after
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i've duplicated the image i'm going to
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take my top layer
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go to image adjustments invert
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don't freak out one more step i'm going
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to adjust my blending layer here in the
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layers palette i'm going to select that
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and go all the way down to
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hue as you can see we are like i said
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about 80 90
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of the way there after this there's just
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some simple color adjustments we need to
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do in photoshop to get us the rest of
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the way
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um so we're going to go to image once
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again adjustments
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human saturation first we're going to
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play with the master layer
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let's go and take this down a little bit
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on the hue
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let's bump up the saturation just a tad
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and then let's bump
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down the lightness all right once again
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getting closer as you can tell let's do
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a few more
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alterations here let's take the original
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image now because what i'm seeing is a
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lot of
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um light and bright on this that isn't
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necessarily present in the original
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so i'm gonna have to actually adjust the
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bottom layer first i'm gonna go to image
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adjustments
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and tweak the layers i'm going to bring
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the darks up just
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a tad once again getting more of that
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orange hue that you see in the original
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then i'm going to go to image
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adjustments another time
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hue saturation this time i'm going to be
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adjusting the
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yellow on the drop down the yellow hues
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let's kind of bump the hue up a little
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bit
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oh yeah see now we're getting some of
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those nice blues in there
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let's take down the saturation of the
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yellows a little
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perfect there we go more blue
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let's see if we bump up the brightness
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or the lightness just a hair
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so as you can see um we and we could
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continue tweaking this to get everything
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to be perfectly
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exact but with just a few simple you
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know
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tweaks here and there we more or less
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have been able to recreate
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this image and that's basically how
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um these guys were able to achieve this
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look and start this really fun internet
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rumor
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i hope you guys have enjoyed this video
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please make sure to check out
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thesmokies.com where we've also posted
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an article
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about debunking this internet myth which
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is a fun little op-ed
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um which i hope you guys enjoy reading
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and if you haven't already
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make sure that you like and subscribe on
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our youtube channel
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thanks so much for watching guys till
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next time