I recently taught an Introductory workshop for Photoshop on Layers and Masks.  While most of the attendees found the workshop very useful, the general consensus was that making selections for masking would take a lot of practice and that while Photoshop does a good job, the user interface can be complicated and some of the tools cumbersome.  I tend to use a third party tool for this myself and was reminded of its efficacy by a webinar delivered by my fellow educator #BlakeRudis.  The tool I advocate is called Remask and until recently was available only as a plugin for editing applications from the folks at Topaz Labs.  That changed with the recent update to Remask 5.