What is Acrobat's Default Color Profile?

Question

Hello,
We have a client's client who used a novice graphic designer who didn't color manage, and created a PDF containing colors that the client is pleased with. Trouble is, we have no idea what the desiner assumed as the color profile and the color profile that the client's Acrobat defaults to when displaying the PDF. And now we're having trouble recreating a PDF that the client deems matching. Our office has long since switched to ProPhoto RGB as our default RGB color profile, so we don't know what Adobe Acrobat ships with as its default (assumed) color profile when there are none embedded/assigned in the PDF (ours is now ProPhoto RGB).
1. Can someone who's not monkeyed with their color settings open up their Acrobat and look under the Preferences (ctrl-k), and "color management" and let me know what the working spaces read?
Also,
2. Is there a way to know what (if any) color profile a PDF has embedded in it? I cannot seem to find it in the PDF's metadata, and typically play with the "output preview" settings until I find one that doesn't alter the appearance (not the most efficient).
Thanks!

Answer 1

DeviceRGB is the default condition for many PDF creation workflows as it was the very first one supported in PDF version 1.0. - because PostScript 1.0 initially supported DeviceRGB and DeviceGray, with DeviceCMYK arriving later. ICC-based spaces came in PostScript 2 (PDF 1.3).
"Device..." spaces simply mean that the color data is preserved as-supplied from the original material - for example a scanner will see a particular red ink on the paper and record it with a certain RGB value. Unless that scan is subsequently assigned a calibration profile, the bitmap image may not look identical when re-printed but it is "accurate" in terms of what the scanner wrote to file. You can think of "Device..." spaces as being "raw data", so if you have two photographs on a PDF page, both from different sources but with DeviceRGB space, then pixels of (123,0,0) in each image will be an identical color on one particular user's monitor and printer. That color will only match the actuality of what was photographed (and what other users are seeing) if the user's display hardware is calibrated, but that's a different question entirely. Acrobat cannot correct for an uncalibrated monitor.
In the very early says of PDF and PostScript it was adopted as a print/prepress format, so color accuracy was important and features such as Output Intents and PDF/X were rapidly developed. Now, the majority of PDF files are never printed and many are designed with on-screen display as the only planned use - where RGB and unmanaged colors are perfectly acceptable. Nobody will ever notice the difference between AdobeRGB and sRGB when peering at a PDF file on a cellphone, but embedding the profiles will dramatically increase the filesize.