The theoretical results are illustrated by simulations for a 2D version of the exponentially ill-posed optical tomography inverse problem for the diffusion and absorption coefficient spatial distributions. The modified Tikhonov regularization performs the mapping of the minimization variables, which are the coefficients of the spline expansions for the diffusion and absorption, to physical space. This incorporates the inherently differing scales of these variables in the minimization, and also suggests relative weighting of the regularization terms with respect to each parameter space. The presented modification of the IRGN allows greater flexibility for implementations of IRGN solutions of ill-posed inverse problems in which differing scales in physical space hinder standard IRGN inversions.