A three-dimensional (3D) measurement method of color fringe projection based on an improved three-step phase-shifting method is proposed. The color fringe pattern is encoded by two cosine fringe patterns with the same frequency but different shifting phase and a uniform gray flat image into three color channels R, G, and B. Although the measurement speed of the traditional three-step phase-shifting method can meet the requirements of measuring 3D objects, it makes the noise and inaccuracy of the captured images increase, and each image will cause measurement error. Therefore, we improve the three-step phase-shifting method and introduce the Hilbert transform into the three-step phase-shift method. The DC component of the fringe pattern is obtained by using the Hilbert transform principle, and the third fringe pattern in the three-step phase-shift method is replaced by the captured light intensity distribution of the DC component. The phase difference of the other two fringe patterns is fixed as π/2 by the Hilbert transform. The improved three-step phase-shifting method is used to obtain the phase information of the deformed color fringe image, and then the phase-unwrapping algorithm is used to obtain the phase distribution information of the whole field. The results show that the improved method can not only accurately calculate the phase information but also greatly improve the measurement speed and quality.