Couple of Photoshop (CS2) Questions

OK, I'm new to this whole Photoshop thing, and man, its confusing!!! I think I've got my head around the very basics, but now I've got a few questions that the help and my "Classroom in a Book" book couldn't help me with. I'm making a senior page for the yearbook, so theres a lot of photos and text. My plan is to have the top 2/3 be pics, the bottom 1/3 be text, and a dark border around the edge for quotes. To make the dark border, I'm basically making a rectangular black box that's translucent, so you can still see the pics underneath it, but the text is readable. Thats working pretty well, but I'd like the edges of the box to be more transparent than the rest, fading the box into the picture behind it. How do I do that? Second, I want to wrap the text along the border (so when it hits an edge, it turns and continues along the next edge), but I can't figure out the "work path" that the help talks about. Finally, I can't seem to figure out how to crop images once they're in my main document. What I've been having to do is import the photo, crop what I want, drag the selection from the photo's document into my main document, and save. But once its in the main document, when I use the crop tool, it deletes everything outside the selection, even the stuff outside the layer. Why is it doing this? How do I crop within a single layer?

Thanks!

Oh boy, you've lots to learn! To crop a single layer use the RECTANGLE tool, select what you want cropped, make sure you SELECT the layer you want - then you need to INVERSE the rectangle and hit delete. Get friendly with the STROKE skill... you can make a box, make a new layer and go to edit > stroke and it will just make an outline of the box or circle or whatever. The text can be tricky, illustrator is much better at text manipulation that photochop - remember photoshop is really designed for images - illustrator is designed for print art. When I have more time I can post some more but I'm off to dinner!

OK, I got the text, sort of. It works, but its not the most practical. Basically, I used the pen to make a path around the border, then had the text follow it. The problem is, because the path surrounds the entire page, any time I try to make a new text box, it automatically selects the text along the border. I have to creat a new text box outside the page, then move it inside. I also can't figure out how to make text wrap around images and objects. And I still can't figure out that fade thing with the border.