In this paper, we present a new regularization paradigm for inverse based regularized image reconstruction techniques. These methods usually attempt to minimize a cost function expressed as the sum of a data-fitting term and a regularization term. The trade-off between both terms is determined by a weighting parameter that has to be set by the user since this trade-off is data dependent. In the approach we present here, we first concentrate on finding a set of eligible candidates for the data fitting term minimization and then select the most appropriate candidate according to the regularization criterion. The main advantage of this method is that it does not require any weighting parameter, and guarantees that no over-regularization can occur. We illustrate this method with a super-resolution reconstruction technique to show its efficiency compared to other competitive methods. Comparisons are carried out with simulated and real data.