i come for a PS background too and its very similiar. the primary room in color has 4 curves just like what you see in PS, R,G,B and luminosity which is akin to brightness but also dulls/greys the image as you raise/lower, thus the highlight/shadow and overal saturation control in the top right of the screen. gamma is contrast, gain is exposure, lift is brightness (will also dull blacks).
there are also 3 controls for shadow/mid/hi tint/saturation/ and black/white point (akin to levels)
most of the time you can do everything right there. you may go into the secondary room, (just more color corrections, akin to Hue/Sat controls in PS for each color) for further adjustments. whats neat about color is it uses click points and drag like curves do. you raise the line up for more of a change or down to decrease it. you can also curve the line so that reds are desaturated and the rest of the colors get more saturated.
there are some ok color fx in another room, 90% are lame.
add all to the render que in the render output room. when do send back to final cut. a new timeline will apear in your project folder that says: sequence 1 (from color).
