Hi Deb,
Thanks once again for your response.
I have both cropped the image and reduced the resolution, but the large 2222×500 rectangle displaying the cropped feature image remains on the blog. It takes whatever the featured image is and stretches it to fit that space (the quality of the picture dropped dramatically after the crop/resolution changes).
Is there any way I could get WordPress to simply not show the featured image in the blog post, only designating it for the thumbnail?
Thanks again for your time.