The options for color correcting are found under Image>Adjustments>(Lots ‘o options, many decent) (Img 16) I’ll go through a few of the options, but the easiest way to get to know them is simply by trying each one and playing around. With these and with filters any adjustments made are applied to your selected layer if nothing is selected and the selected part of the layer if something is. They can not be applied to more then one layer simultaneously (or if they can, I won't confuse you with that yet).
Levels (Image>Adjustments>Levels or Ctrl+L) allows you to edit how much darks, lights, and middle tones occupy the picture by moving the 5 sliders  .
Color Balance (Image>Adjustments>Color Balance or Ctrl+B) allows you to adjust the reds, greens, and blues of the dark tones, mid tones, and highlights.
Hue/Saturation (Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation or Ctrl+U) allows control over the hue, the contrast, and the saturation. It can be applied to a specific color range through the drop down at top.
Curves (Image>Adjustments>Curves or Ctrl+M Img 17) is my favorite and probably the most confusing and powerful. My advice, as always, is to play around with it.
I could go through other options, but these are the main ones I use, and you’ll get a lot more out of simply playing with the adjustment effects. I'm purposefully not describing exactly what each slider does even in the ones I mentioned because A) it would take up a bunch of space and B) they're fairly intuitive and well labeled.
In order for it not to look like faked colors the best approach is to make a great number of subtle changes some times on different copies of the same layer with varying opacities and layer modes for each of these duplicated layers. With practice you’ll start to get the hang of it.
But what if you adjust the color, work on another part of the picture and then decide the color adjustment done previously is no good? I’m glad you asked.
You can go into the history palette (Img 3) and hope you’re able to go back that far.
You can also drag the source image back into your photoshop document (before you made all those changes you did save the source image separately? Right? Good.) I’m sure you’ve cut the layer up a bit. To align the source image later and edited layer I’ll usually set the source image layer on 50% (5) and move it around (v) at a very zoomed in state (z) until the pixels match the layer below. Then I bring the opacity of the source image layer back up to 100% (0). If all you did was traced out a part of the edited layer you can Ctrl + Select the picture in the layer window which will give you a selection of the outline of that layer (neat trick, huh?). If you used a mask you can Ctrl+Select the map icon in the layers palette for the same result. Then select the source image layer in the layers palette and press delete, erasing the unwanted areas (you might need to invert the selection Ctrl+Shift+I) Ctrl +D deselects the selection and you can trash the originally poorly color corrected layer and try color correcting this new layer far better then before. (This time remember to make a duplicate which you turn the visiblity off on so you have a back up if the color correcting needs fixing later on).
Although I tried to do a decent job explaining there were 5 or so required steps and things got understandably hairy for what I'm labeling a beginner's tutorial. You’re still not satisfied and I understand. There is yet again a better way in the magic that is color adjustment layers.
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