Now that you know more then anyone ever should know of the ins and outs of layers it's time to see how to delete parts of a layer. There’s a variety of ways and I’ll let you figure out what works best for you.
The simplest way is with the eraser tool  (E ) Simply brush over what you want to delete and it’s gone. Perhaps you only want to reduce the opacity by 30% - also doable. Just slide the eraser opacity option in the Options window down to 30.
It’s a fairly blunt method (unless you have a wacom, but again I talk more about that in the photoshop painting tutorial) that has it’s place but as you’ve guessed there’s better ways out there.
If you have a big solid color backgound you can use the magic wand  (w) to select that color. Simply click over the color. Once you see the dancing ants around it (Img 7) you can press delete to delete the selection.
If you hold down shift while on the wand a plus sign appears and you can now add to the selection selecting multiple colors, one after another. Alt adds a minus sign allowing you to subtract colors from the selection.
The wand is finding all the pixels within a color range of the pixel you selected. This range can be adjusted in the Options Window  from 1 (selects only that exact color pixel) to 255 (selects everything). 32 is usually a good standby (32 pixels around that exact color).
A pixel (Img 7b), for those of you in the dark, is the basic building block of any image on the computer. It's a single color square. If you zoom in to 1600% each of the squares you see is called a pixel.
There are further options by either right clicking while in wand mode (Img 7c) or by going to the Selection drop down (Img 8). You can expand or subtract the selection by a certain number of pixels, feather the selection, or refine the edges which allows you to do a little bit of everything. To feather the edge means instead of a hard edge, as if scissors were used to cut it out, the image softly fades out more slowly allowing for it to fade into the other images on the layers below (could be over the course of 2 to many, many more pixels). Simply turn up the feather (Img 9) and watch in wonder.
 With the wand there’s an option for contingous (Img 10). If unchecked you’ll not only get the same color touching your selection, but anything of that color throughout the picture. You can have it look at all layers or just your layer through another check box (Img 10). The last way to select by color is to go to Select>Color Range... and use the color picker (the eye dropper  ) to choose what color and the slider to adjust fuzziness (which is another way of asking how close to the exact pixel you originally seleceted are you accepting.). Everything with a film of red covering it gets selected.
To be honest, deleting an area by selecting a color either with the wand or any other way rarely works for me. Aren’t you glad I just went over it? It'll work for green screens and other very specific settings, but other then that it's a rare event. If I’m cutting something out I’m doing it the old fashion way. I print it out, use a pair of scissors, and scan it back in. All right, bad joke-but the principle's the same – I trace around it.
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