You'll also notice the Layers and filters menu grayed out. You'll notice your file now taking up half as much space as well. I wonder if anyone here can give advice on scanning in 16 bits with a Leafscan 45. The scans I get in this mode are all very dark and in the histogram all the information is crowded in the shadows. My attempts at correction result in some pretty weird colour effects.
Most scanners sample more than eight bits of data per channel.
Not all of them are capable of exporting a file with more than 8 bpc, though. This is a theoretically superior method, but in practice there is considerable question as to how valid the additional data is. I tried to test this before I wrote my last book, where a couple of pages of the results appear in print at a size large enough to draw conclusions. With the 20 high-bit files, I really tortured them with a series of curves much more drastic than would be used in real life. I was saving the changes as Actions.