To reduce the projection fringes in three dimensional profile measurement by traditional phase shift method and to improve the measuring speed, a dual-frequency and 4-step phase-shifting color fringe profilometry is proposed to measure the 3-D shapes of objects with step-jumps and discontinuous shapes. Dual-frequency color fringe patterns with 4-steps phase-shifting are generated by computer encoding with four low-frequency and high-frequency sinusoidal fringe patterns. These color fringe patterns are projected onto the tested objects by a digital video projector, and the deformed fringe patterns are captured by a color CCD/CMOS camera and stored into a computer. Then, the recorded fringe patterns are separated into their RGB components and become 8 frames of fringe patterns. One image related to the background is also obtained by the sum of four dual-frequency color fringe patterns. The shapes of tested objects are acquired from high-frequency fringe patterns, and the ambiguous phase jumps caused by steps are eliminated by using low-frequency fringe patterns. To determine the shadow and dark background, the image related to the background is binarized and used for correcting the phase extraction. The experimental results verify that the proposed method can measure exactly the step-jumps and discontinuous shapes with only four images. Compared with existing methods, the presented method can effectively reduce the quantity of information of fringe projection and image acquisition.