An evaluation method of real photonic crystal fibers(PCFs) based on compressed sensing with Contourlet transform was proposed for evaluating optical properties of PCFs. Integrated with the total variation denoising method, only 48% cross-section data of PCFs can be used to reconstruct the whole cross-section of PCF, and the edge features of air holes in multi-scale and multi-direction were also effectively preserved. The classical images, a large mode area PCF and a polarization maintaining PCF product were used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrated that the cross-section images of real PCFs can be effectively rebuilt by 48% cross-section data. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to apply the compressed sensing with the Contourlet transform to reconstruct the cross-section images of PCFs for evaluating the optical properties of real PCFs.