Camera Raw and 16 bit tiff

I am attemting to digitise a large number of transparencies, I have a Plustek film scanner with the Silverfast LE software, whilst it is fine with negatives the results with transparencies leaves a lot to be desired.

If I scan in 48 bit HDR, save as a 16 bit tiff (not letting Silverfast do any adjustments), load it into Photoshop and process it there, I can get pretty good results.

What I want to do is be able to get one scan just-so, then automatically apply the same adjiustments to the rest of them, and the only way I can think of is to use ACR to process the tiff's and save the adjustments as a preset, then just apply it to the rest in turn.

However, when I 'open with ACR' on the tiff (in Bridge), it only seems to open it as a 24 bit tif and all the dynamic range is lost, it says '8 bit' on the blue hyper-link line underneath the preview (remember it worked fine in PS itself). The actual scanned file is very dark so I need the extra bits to extract a decent image.

Anyone know what I'm missing, or is there a better way of achieving the same results?

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