A coherent laser beam is split into an illumination beam and a reference beam. A portion of the illumination beam is passed through, or reflected off of, a subject to create a subject distribution, and a portion of the reference beam is passed through a pinhole, or reflected off a point-like reflector, to produce a reference distribution. An imaging system is used to form an aerial image of the subject distribution and the reference distribution. The resulting aerial image of the subject distribution exhibits improved resolution, depth of field and field size.