Thibault P Dierolf M Bunk O Menzel A Pfeiffer F 2009 Ptychography is a coherent diffractive imaging method that uses multiple diffraction patterns obtained through the scan of a localized illumination on the specimen. Until recently, reconstruction algorithms for ptychographic datasets needed the a priori knowledge of the incident illumination. A new reconstruction procedure that retrieves both the specimen's image and the illumination profile was recently demonstrated with hard X-ray data. We present here the algorithm in greater details and illustrate its practical applicability with a visible light dataset. Improvements in the quality of the reconstruction are shown and compared to previous reconstruction techniques. Implications for future applications with other types of radiation are discussed. https://sonar.ch/global/documents/713 eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1016/j.ultramic.2008.12.011 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/pmid/19201540 Ultramicroscopy. - 2009 Probe retrieval in ptychographic coherent diffractive imaging. http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501