Reverse time migration (RTM), for imaging complex Earth models, is a reversal procedure of the forward modelling of seismic wavefields, and hence can be formulated as an inverse problem. The least-squares RTM method attempts to minimise the difference between the observed field data and the synthetic data generated by the migration image. It can reduce the artefacts in the images of a conventional RTM which uses an adjoint operator, instead of an inverse operator, for the migration. However, as the least-squares inversion provides an average solution with minimal variation, the resolution of the reflectivity image is compromised. This paper presents the least-squares RTM method with a model constraint defined by an L1-norm of the reflectivity image. For solving the least-squares RTM with L1 norm regularisation, the inversion is reformulated as a ‘basis pursuit de-noise (BPDN)’ problem, and is solved directly using an algorithm called ‘spectral projected gradient for L1 minimisation (SPGL1)’. Three numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the method which can mitigate artefacts and produce clean images with significantly higher resolution than the least-squares RTM without such a constraint.