No. I almost always make my brush fairly soft.
This is tough because it depends on what your doing. I normally use Wacom tablet and I have the opacity set to pen pressure and I change the flow rate based on what I'm doing. If you're using a mouse, I would say to set the opacity to 100% and lower the flow rate to suit your taste.
There is really no optimal brush size. I change this as often as I sample. It depends on how much area I want to cover. I almost never use large brush sizes when cloning. I like to work small to avoid doubling.
OK.........on to the work.
There's definitely an improvement! But there is still quite a bit of doubling. You need to really inspect your work and look for doubling.
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The grassy area looks very nice and extremely well groomed. Almost turf like. You have lost the shadow by the stairs. I like the grass (or whatever that ground cover might actually be) to be more natural looking and not so manicured. It needs some character to be believable.
Perhaps a bit more like this. Note the shadow and the edge between the curb and the grass.
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Your edge is still very blurry. Did you feather the selection oyu made while cloning?
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