A method enabling a visual and numerical recovery of the change of fluorophore matrix aligning interactions upon the electronic excitation of fluorophores. in planar ordered media (e.g. planar membranes or Langmuir Blodgett films), is discussed. The introduced method, based on two particular experimental arrangements for the time-resolved polarized fluorescence measurements and the necessary parameterization. is exemplified by a series of the synthetic data and their numerical analyses. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.