Left: distribution of VMC counterparts of all sources in our catalogue grouped by confidence class (see Table 7) in the VMC colour-colour plane compared to the typical location of QSOs marked by the dotted line (see Cioni et al. 2013, Eq. (1)–(3)) and the distribution of LMC stars (colour mesh; found by matching VMC with Gaia proper motion selection). The colour scale gives the number of sources in each colour-colour bin. The bin sizes are 0.01 mag for both axes. Right: sources in our catalogue in the colour-magnitude plane compared to different stellar evolution stages and features caused by foreground and background objects (see Sun et al. 2017, their Fig. 2 and Sect. 3.1; MS: main-sequence, RGB: red giant branch, RC: red clump, RSG: red supergiants, FGS: foreground Galactic stars, BGG: background galaxies) and LMC stars (colour mesh). The colour scale gives the number of sources in each colour-magnitude bin. The bin sizes are 0.01 and 0.02 mag for Y−J and Ks, respectively.