Casagrande, LucaWolf, ChristianMackey, DougalNordlander, ThomasYong, DavidBessell, Michael2021-05-062021-05-060035-8711http://hdl.handle.net/1885/232503The SkyMapper photometric surveys provides uvgriz photometry for several millions sources in the Southern sky. We use DR1.1 to explore the quality of its photometry, and develop a formalism to homogenize zero-points across the sky using stellar effective temperatures. Physical flux transformations, and zero-points appropriate for this release are derived, along with relations linking colour indices to stellar parameters. Reddening-free pseudo-colours and pseudo-magnitudes are also introduced. For late-type stars which are best suited for Galactic Archaeology, we show that SkyMapper + 2MASS are able to deliver a precision better than 100 K in effective temperatures (depending on the filters), ∼0.2  dex for metallicities above −2, and a reliable distinction between M-dwarfs and -giants. Together with astrometric and asteroseismic space mission, SkyMapper promises to be a treasure trove for stellar and Galactic studies.LC, ADM, and DY acknowledge support from the Australian Research Council (grants FT160100402, FT160100206 and FT140100554). Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013. This research made use of TOPCAP (Taylor 2005). The national facility capability for SkyMapper has been funded through ARC LIEF grant LE130100104 from the Australian Research Council, awarded to the University of Sydney, the Australian National University, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of Queensland, the University of Western Australia, the University of Melbourne, Curtin University of Technology, Monash University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory. SkyMapper is owned and operated by The Australian National University’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.application/pdfen-AU© 2018 The Author(s)stars: fundamental parametersstars: late-typeGalaxy: stellar content201910.1093/mnras/sty28782020-12-27