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The key to getting a good selection quickly is to make it easy for the automated tools like the "Quick Selection" tool.   The way to do this is to make a temporary copy of the original in which you brighten murky shadows, sharpen everything, increase the vibrance (so weakly saturated colors become more saturated), etc.  Then, "quick select" can often do 90% or more of the work, with only a little touch-up work remaining.  

So, what I did was bring one copy of the image into ACR, cranked up the clarity, shadows, vibrance and sharpening, exported the resulting horrible looking image into PS, ran it through the high pass filter (set to around 10 px), and then turned the Quick Select tool loose on it.    There was only one small area that it missed, so I used a bit of "refine edges", and then I filled in the tiny bit that remained with the poly select tool.

I then opened up a 2nd, normal looking copy of the original in PS, moved the above selection over from the 1st copy, and performed the extraction.  Total time < 5 min.

HTH,

Tom

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