The conventional two-dimensional (2D) digital image correlation (DIC) method often fails to work when there is a large rotation between the reference and deformed images. The objective of this study is to propose a 2D DIC method to tackle this issue and calculate the full-field rotation angle. In our method, the deformed subset is chosen along the direction of gradient orientation angle error (GOAE) between the pseudo point of interest and the searching point. In addition, the initial deformation parameters for the inverse compositional Gaussian–Newton (IC-GN) method are set based on the GOAE to guarantee its convergence. Furthermore, a best fit method is presented to calculate the rotation angle of each target deformed subset using the converged deformation parameters from IC-GN method. Moreover, due to the high computation intensity of the proposed method, a multi-thread parallel computation technique is used to speed up its computation. Simulation and bending experiment results show that the proposed method can measure both the full-field in-plane displacement and rotation angle with relatively high accuracy and efficiency in the case of a large rotation, in comparison with the conventional DIC method and a ring template-based method. The proposed method is also robust to the strained deformation and image noise to some degree.