There is a lot more to Illustrator than we had time to cover. So, I've listed the things you might want to know more about, and listed the pages in the Users' Guide that do a decent job of explaining them. If they are not visible, you can use the pop-up menu attached to the Character palette and choose Show Options. This will extend the Character palette so you can access tracking.
Baseline shift is also available from that part of the palette.
Layers can help. You can put the photoshop image on a layer of its own, and then lock that layer so it can't be selected or moved. Create a new layer for all your type and Illustrator elements. No need to put them all on separate layers because each element retains its identity and is easily selected by clicking. You can add new swatches to the swatch palette, and there are a lot of ways of doing it.