inserting images in a pages document

I have a rather unusual project that involves ancient forms of Chinese characters. For the modern forms, I can simply use a Japanese or Chinese font, but for the ancient forms, I have to scan hand-written characters and insert them into a regular text as small images. I am able to do that with scanned images in gif files and can manipulate them into the correct positions. The images, however, need to be cleaned up and background noise and the slightly different color of the paper need to be removed to make it look nice. A friend did that for me, but the gif images I now have, while they look very nice, cannot be manipulates as before. The "object placement" options in the inspector tool are grayed out, and so I can't select or change anything. When I drop an image into the text, I can drag it to the approximate position, but the image is not aligned with the text line (being slightly too high), and using the direction arrows that worked for fine-tuning the positioning in the scanned versions do not work with this. It simply jumps to the line below and doesn't move the image. Any ideas how to get the cleaned-up gif files of the images in a format that responds to the pages inspector tool?