Nowadays, the optical components or high-precision instruments need to have coating finishing; however, large thin film stress will cause severe deformation of the structure and damage the components. Therefore, accurate estimation of thin film stress is essential. In general, the thin film stress is determined by Stoney equation, which only requires application of curvature radius of a substrate before and after thin film coating into the equation to estimate the stress; and using an appropriate optical measurement technology is important. This article will focus on introduction of optical measurement technologies. In addition, application of photoelasticity for stress analysis will also be introduced in this article. The internal stress of a material can be estimated directly by adopting photoelasticity method. We will also present several practical cases of stress measurement in this article.