In the last three decades of developments, the technique of Digital Photoelasticity (DP) has been stabilized and the methodology has been successfully applied to a wide range of problems in Engineering and science. This review succinctly summarizes both the techniques and their applications. Sufficient attention is paid to bring out the problem-solving capability of photoelasticity in each of the domains so as to motivate the reader to extrapolate these ideas to the uncharted territory of new problems they may come across in their domains. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd