Lightroom/Camera Raw: Fill in empty areas in transformed or cropped/rotated image

Just as a clarification, a way this might be accomplished is, following a change of this sort, the canvas could be expanded to a rectangle;  Alternatively, there could be an option in the Transform menu to expand the canvas to a rectangle.  

Why can't Lightroom fill in these blank areas with some added pixels so that this subsequent editing can be done within LR?

LR is a non-destructive raw file editor, which never modifies the raw file's image data. In order to implement your suggestion a 2nd raw file would need to be created with an expanded canvas area. Given that each camera manufacturer's raw file format is proprietary Adobe may not have sufficient information to implement canvas expansion. Also keep in mind the "modified" raw file copy may not work properly in other raw editing applications, including the manufacturer's own raw editing software.

The simplest way to do his currently is use 'Edit in Photoshop, which also has better cloning tools than LR.

No. This is a job for Photoshop.

The logical choice would be an intermediate DNG file similar to HDR, Panorama and Enhanced Details.

Agreed. That way the original raw file remains unmodified and it's more likely Adobe can implement this using the open source DNG file format.

No. This is a job for Photoshop.

I agree that PS has better tools for this purpose, but it would be useful to have this capability inside LR.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Lightroom Classic CC: Please add Content Aware Crop.

Please content aware crop to Lightroom Classic CC.  This would be a huge help for when rotating and cropping to fill areas that in LR we currently can only crop out.  It is a PITB to need to export to PS to simply do a content aware crop, which it could easily be added to LR Classic.

Of course, as others have mentioned, better clone/heat tools in LR Classic would be helpful also, even just for spot adjustments, but the content aware crop is something I'm very surprised has not been added to LR once it was made good in PS.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled LR: make content aware fill also available in geometry panel.

Lightroom supports content aware fill in white border areas after panorama stitching. It would be very helpful to have the same technology also for filling white areas after transforming images with the geometry tools to fill white areas at the image borders (and therefore make them also available for editing (clone tool...))