Imperfections and nonrobust behavior of practical multilevel spatial light modulators (SLMs) degrade the performance of many proposed full-complex amplitude modulation schemes. We consider the use of more robust binary SLMs for this purpose. We propose a generic method, by which, out of K binary (or $1\mathrm{bit}$ ) SLMs of size $M\times N$ , we effectively create a new $2^K$ -level (or K bit) SLM of size $M\times N$ . The method is a generalization of the well-known concepts of bit plane representation and decomposition for ordinary gray scale digital images and relies on forming a properly weighted superposition of binary SLMs. When K is sufficiently large, the effective SLM can be regarded as a full-complex one. Our method is as efficient as possible from an information theoretical perspective. A $4f$ system is discussed as a possible optical implementation. This $4f$ system also provides a means for eliminating the undesirable higher diffraction orders. The components of the $4f$ system can easily be customized for different production technologies.