Best method of turning white bg into transparent alpha

I often get product shots that are on a seamless white background. They sometimes have soft shadows which I find particularly hard to extract. I need to get transparency/alpha channel in the actual image for After Effects, so the Layer Style "blend if" trick won't work since I have to use it outside of Photoshop.  If it was shot on green, I could easily extract the image and retain the translucent soft shadows with a AE chromakey.
The new Quick Select Tool and Refine Edge don't seem particularly well suited for non-organic hard edged surfaces.  Any other tricks or tips?

try image>calculations to make a new channel then use that to create an image mask to separate the shad
.i have no idea why you would do it this way when you can set the LAYER MODE to multiply in both PS & AE and that would do the job far better

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