Problems with Photoshop

I definitely had some problems with photoshop. The image I hoped to create was not what I ended up with. Originally I hoped to take the medium of an iPod Touch and show all the content that it has. The biggest problem I had with this was actually finding images. I decided to focus on one area of content and chose music. At first I found photoshop to be extremely frustrating. It was difficult to erase the background on certain images, and I feel like there should be an easier way. Some images were difficult to cut and paste onto another page. The more I played around with photoshop the easier it became, but I still have questions. I was wondering, is there a way to make images fade into the background? Also, how do you washout a picture or make it transparent? And is there a way to outline a picture? The message I hoped to portray was that iPods have become a common part of society and everyday life, but once again a had a hard time finding images that actually showed this