Images, CSS and p Tags

Question

I have a site I recently launched with Contribute and Dreamweaver.  I am using CSS to control the alignment and spacing of images.
The problem I'm having is that I get strange rendering from pages created in Contribute because, by default, it wants to put images that are inserted in pages with text inside paragraph tags (<p>).  Even if the image is on its own line, it is inserted in a <p> tag.  I've tried adjusting my CSS to accomodate this, but it doesn't solve the problem.
Does anyone know how to insert an image without putting it inside a <p> tag, if there is text on the page?  (Inserting an image on the page by itself does not create a <p> tag.)
The only workaround I've been able to find is inserting a horizontal rule, selecting the horizontal rule, inserting the image and then deleting the horizontal rule.  This works, but it's far from ideal.

Answer 1

Thanks for the input.  I'm well aware of how to use CSS.  The focus of this discussion was really how to get images out of <p> tags, not how to write a bunch of extra CSS to undo what Contribute really shouldn't be doing to images.
I am committed to use CSS on my site, but I am also committed to making that CSS easy to use, which mean working at tag and block levels as much as I can, rather than becoming "class happy".  I know I have to use classes to do the left and right alignment, but let me share a specific scenario where CSS shouldn't be used.
I have an <h2> element that is the full width of my container.  Below that, I have a <p> element for my paragraph.  For my design, I want the paragraph to have 1em of padding.  Now, I want an image banner that is the full width of the container, so it can nest under the <h2> and be the same width.  If I insert the image in Contribute above the <p>, it puts that in a <p> tag.  Now, the image is too wide because it's trying to add padding around something that is already the full width of the page.  I can't add a rule to remove the padding from all images, because that would remove padding from images that need it also.
I could write a custom CSS class to resolve this issue, but that takes time, adds to my CSS file size and gums up my dropdown menu with an unnecessary class that's only used to solve this one scenario.  Instead, it makes more sense to just break the image out of the paragraph tag and treat it as a block.
This is an example of what I was trying to get Contribute to do.  I just needed the image tag as such, an image, not an image inside my paragraph padding rules.
In this case "remove paragraph breaks" is the most logical choice, rather than writing a bunch of CSS to undo Contribute's quirks.