Two-step quadrature phase-shifting digital holography based on the calculated intensity of a reference wave is proposed. In the Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) architecture, the method only records two quadrature-phase holograms, without reference-wave intensity or object-wave intensity measurement, to perform object recoding and reconstruction. When the reference-wave intensity is calculated from the 2D correlation coefficient (CC) method that we presented, the clear reconstruction image can be obtained by some specific algorithm. Its feasibility and validity were verified by a series of experiments with 2D objects and 3D objects. The presented method will be widely used in real-time or dynamic digital holography applications.