At ambient temperature a drying material can be driven far from equilibrium leading to the development of an enormous stress. When the material solidifies, heterogeneities in both space and time display mechanical instabilities such as fracture and buckling. Until now, research has been focused on either studying the macroscopic stress experienced by a drying material or direct imaging of crack patterns. The lack of correlation between structure and tensile stress is mostly due to the difficulty of measuring the stress locally. Here we present a new method to image the stress at a micron scale without requiring any assumptions about elastic properties of the sample which can vary with time over the course of drying. The drying film is deposited on top of a 100 micron thick layer of a transparent linear elastomer. The stress throughout the drying film is transmitted to the substrate, displacing a plane of fluorescent tracers which has previously been embedded near the interface. The stress field can therefore be deduced by the displacements of the tracer particles. Different kinds of films have been investigated such as colloidal suspensions, polymers and biomaterials. In particular, this tracking method has allowed us to image the local stress distribution around the tip of a crack.