Abstract. This paper introduces a new approach to computing an approximate solution of Tikhonov-regularized large-scale ill-posed problems with a general nonlinear regularization operator. The iterative method applies a sequence of projections onto generalized Krylov subspaces using a semi-implicit approach to deal with the nonlinearity in the regularization term. A suitable value of the regularization parameter is determined by the discrepancy principle. Computed examples illustrate the performance of the method applied to the restoration of blurred and noisy images