photo fadeout and transparent background on line art

[Geeas]

1. I'm new to PI.
2. Yes I will take the beginner's workshop as soon as possible.
3. These two topics probably have been covered dozens of times in the past.
4. I couldn't find them in the archieves.
5. I am using PI vers 8

What I am trying to do.
I'm trying to take a photo of a person and gradually fade out the bottom of the photo to white so that I can place text over top of it.

I have b&w photo that was scaned and saved as a tif (also as a JPEG).
I opened it in PI and went to edit and clicked on duplicate > base image w/objects (not merged) so as not to ruin my original image.

NEXT?
Note: I will add the text in Publisher not PI.

Item two.
I have a piece of line art that was scaned in an early version of PI. It has a white background to it. I want to drop the white background out (in other words I want a transparent (clear) background so I can place the art over top of another piece of art and have the other piece of art show through the line art. (this to be done in Publisher)
I opened the line art in PI and duplicated as above.

NEXT?

Thank you...