Digital image correlation (DIC) is more and more popular to monitor fatigue crack growth and to determine the stress intensity factors. However, the posttreatment of the recorded displacement fields becomes tricky when the crack faces are not stress‐free and when crack tip plasticity becomes significant. Several posttreatment methods to locate the crack tip and measure the effective stress intensity factors in such cases are compared, using finite element method‐computed displacement fields, and then used on real DIC fields. An approach coupling DIC and finite element method is proposed to estimate the contact stresses along the crack.