The problem of optimal illumination for selective array imaging of small and not well separated scatterers in clutter is considered. The imaging algorithms introduced are based on the coherent interferometric (CINT) imaging functional, which can be viewed as a smoothed version of travel-time migration. The smoothing gives statistical stability to the image but it also causes blurring. The trade-off between statistical stability and blurring is optimized with an adaptive version of CINT. The algorithm for optimal illumination and for selective array imaging uses CINT. It is a constrained optimization problem that is based on the quality of the image obtained with adaptive CINT. The resulting optimal illuminations and selectivity improve the resolution of the images significantly, as can be seen in the numerical simulations presented in the paper.