Achieving color accuracy in the world of desktop publishing can be infuriating; what you see is rarely what you get. Pantone’s ColorDrive strives to improve this situation. It won’t eliminate all of your color-accuracy headaches, but it does make color management easier and helps you get more predictable results from your color-proofing devices.
ColorDrive provides a central mechanism for defining colors and setting up color palettes for desktop publishing applications. With ColorDrive, instead of creating separate color palettes for each application, you can define one set of colors, calibrate the colors to your printer, and then save your palette in any of 14 formats to use in desktop publishing and graphics programs. You can also output palettes in TIFF or EPS formats. This centralized system is a real time-saver.
ColorDrive allow's you to create and edit colors in a broad range of color models — CMYK, RGB, and HSL — as well as die less common YIQ (a standard used for broadcast video) and several color spaces developed by the International Commission on Illumination. You can define color in terms of raw spectral data, or input new colors using a spectrophotometer.
Once you’ve chosen the colors to include in a palette, ColorDrive’s Match to Printer command uses ColorSync printer profiles to reset each color’s CMYK values for optimum printed output. On screen, ColorDrive shows each original color next to a simulation of how that same color will print to the device you’ve selected. In my tests, ColorDrive’s calibrated palettes provided a close (though certainly not perfect) match between screen color and output.
If your monitor has a ColorSync profile, ColorDrive also allows you to proof your color output on screen alone. If you open a palette (or a PICT or TIFF image) and select one of the 32 printer-specific calibrated libraries from the Printers menu, ColorDrive displays a simulation of how the palette or image will look when printed on the device you’ve specified. This can be quite handy, since you can anticipate the output of a job without having a particular printing device in-house. But beware: without an accurate ColorSync profile for both your printer and monitor, ColorDrive’s color-correction features are worthless.
ColorDrive’s simple interface makes building and customizing palettes easy. You can drag and drop color swatches into any position on a palette, and even drag swatches from palette to palette. Double-clicking on a color allows you to edit it. You can define the number of color swatches that appear on each page of a palette, display colors with either full or shortened names, and search for colors by name. You can also print your palettes to create calibrated color charts.
The program comes with its own library of Pantone Color System palettes, including the Pantone Matching System (PMS) for coated and uncoated stock, as well as PMS Metallic Colors, Pastel Colors, and the Pantone Process Color System. By tapping into this library, you can specify a Pantone color, then use ColorDrive to calibrate that color to your printer to ensure that your in-house proofs provide the most accurate color reproduction possible. The Find Closest Match command lets you create a new color from scratch and then automatically finds the nearest matching Pantone color.
The Last Word
Even with ColorDrive, your color output won’t always be what you might expect; variations in printing inks, paper quality, monitor settings, and lighting-conditions make it impossible to achieve truly consistent color on the desktop. But ColorDrive’s calibrated palettes do produce more-predictable results on color printers, and the program’s centralized palette creation unquestionably streamlines color management.
Schorr, Joseph. (November 1995). ColorDrive 1.0. Macworld. (pgs. 70, 72).
Pantone
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pantone_color_drive.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
