A unified, hybrid experimental/numerical approach to digital photoelasticity has been developed. The system consists of an automated polariscope with image capture facilities together with a suite of dedicated software for setting up and controlling the polariscope, for extracting and unwrapping the isoclinic and isochromatic data, for constructing a boundary element (BE) model congruent with the edges of the specimen on the photoelastic images, and for obtaining separated stresses and boundary conditions such as contact stresses via an inverse BE technique. In this paper, the integration of the various techniques is described and illustrated using typical results.