Stress freezing in photoelasticity is regularly employed for 3-D elastic stress analysis of geometrically complex models, wherein the models under load are soaked at the stress freezing temperature and slowly cooled to room temperature. During this process, a model may distort or fail undergoing large deformations at the stress freezing temperature owing to thermo-mechanical interactions. The contribution of thermal deformation to the model distortions is neglected in the available literature of stress freezing. This aspect of stress freezing is investigated in this paper, wherein Digital Image Correlation (DIC) is used to study the strain behavior during a complete stress freezing cycle for an epoxy made of CY230 resin cured with HY951 hardener. The results show that the thermal contributions to the model distortions at the critical temperature must be taken care of to estimate the failure margins. The distortions and failures would mainly depend upon the thermal and mechanical response of the model material and the complexity of the model. © 2016, Society for Experimental Mechanics.