In photoelasticity, the method of obtaining the individual values of principal stresses/normal stresses separately is referred to as stress separation. Shear difference is one of the widely used techniques for stress separation in photoelasticity and one needs the value of fringe order and the isoclinic angle free of noise at every pixel over the domain. For accurate parameter determination, a ten-step phase shifting approach which uses a plane polariscope for isoclinic determination and a circular polariscope for isochromatic determination is proposed. A new quality guided approach for isoclinic unwrapping is developed. Isochromatic phasemap free of ambiguous zones is obtained by a new methodology and is unwrapped by a quality-guided approach. Whole field evaluation of stress components and its representation is then presented. The models used in this study are intentionally subjected to moderate loads showing a high level of isochromatic-isoclinic interaction. In view of this, the isoclinic data has several kinks which is found to cause streak formation in the whole field representation of separated stress components. An outlier smoothing algorithm is proposed for getting a smooth variation of the digital photoelastic parameters over the domain. Use of such smoothed data for stress separation has removed the streaks and has also greatly improved the accuracy of the separated stress components. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.