The Generalized Phase Contrast (GPC) method has been demonstrated to reshape light efficiently to
match the input beam profile requirements of different illumination targets. A spatially coherent beam
can be GPC-shaped into a variety of static and dynamic profiles to match e.g. fixed commercially available
modulation systems or for more irregular and dynamic shapes such as found in advanced optogenetic
light-excitations of neurons. In this work, we integrate a static GPC light shaper to illuminate a phaseonly spatial light modulator encoding dynamic phase holograms. The GPC-enhanced phase-holograms
are encoded to create reconfigurable spot arrays and arbitrary extended patterns. For a given laser power,
our experimental results show a significant intensity gain in the resulting diffraction patterns when we
illuminate the holograms with a GPC-shaped beam as compared to the more common practice of hard
truncation. The phase flatness of the GPC-enhanced readout beam has also been investigated.
& 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND