You can use cv2.convertScaleAbs
for this problem. See the Documentation.
Check out the command terminal demo below :
>>> img = np.empty((100,100,1),dtype = np.uint16)
>>> image = cv2.cvtColor(img,cv2.COLOR_GRAY2BGR)
>>> cvuint8 = cv2.convertScaleAbs(image)
>>> cvuint8.dtype
dtype('uint8')
Hope it helps!!!