Abstract A recently proposed phase unwrapping method using geometric constraints performs well without requiring additional camera, more patterns or global search. The major limitation of this technique is the confined measurement depth range (MDR) within 2π in phase domain. To enlarge the MDR, this paper proposes using color fringes for three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement. Each six fringe periods encoded with six different colors are treated as one group. The local order within one group can be identified with reference to the color distribution. Then the phase wrapped period-by-period is converted into the phase wrapped group-by-group. The geometric constraints of the fringe projection system are used to determine the group order. Such that the MDR is extended from 2π to 12π by six times. Experiment results demonstrate the success of the proposed method to measure two isolated objects with large MDR.