Malaria is a critical health condition that affects both sultry and frigid region worldwide, giving rise to millions of cases of disease and thousands of deaths over the years. Malaria is caused by parasites that enter the human red blood cells, grow there, and damage them over time. Therefore, it is diagnosed by a detailed examination of blood cells under the microscope. This is the most extensively used malaria diagnosis technique, but it yields limited and unreliable results due to the manual human involvement. In this work, an automated malaria blood smear classification model is proposed, which takes images of both infected and healthy cells and preprocesses them in the L* a* b* color space by employing several contrast enhancement methods. Feature extraction is performed using two pretrained deep convolutional neural networks, DarkNet-53 and DenseNet-201. The features are subsequently agglutinated to be optimized through a nature-based feature reduction method called the whale optimization algorithm. Several classifiers are effectuated on the reduced features, and the achieved results excel in both accuracy and time compared to previously proposed methods.