We conducted a systematic investigation of the reflectance diffuse optical tomography using continuous wave (CW) measurements and nonlinear reconstruction algorithms. We illustrated and suggested how to fine-tune the nonlinear reconstruction methods in order to optimize target localization with depth-adaptive regularizations, reduce boundary noises in the reconstructed images using a logarithm based objective function, improve reconstruction quantification using transport models, and resolve crosstalk problems between absorption and scattering contrasts with the CW reflectance measurements. The upgraded nonlinear reconstruction algorithms were evaluated with a series of numerical and experimental tests, which show the potentials of the proposed approaches for imaging both absorption and scattering contrasts in the deep targets with enhanced image quality.