Lens‐based imaging is able to directly provide an image of objects. The high quality lenses required, however, are not readily available for x‐rays. Coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) bypasses this difficulty by numerically inverting the diffraction process undertaken by an object wave. The current CDI methods still face difficulties such as demanding experimental requirements in data collection and sample‐dependent, unreliable convergence in their iterative reconstruction. Recently, we have proposed a new method to resolve these problems. The method employs a modulator and a novel phasing algorithm. Unlike imaging lenses or mirrors, the modulator can take various forms; therefore, it has less demanding requirements on its fabrication. In this paper, we describe more details about the technique.