Pillow support for JPEG2000 comes from openjpeg 2 library. Unfortunatly, Ubuntu‘s libopenjpeg2 package is not version 2 of the openjpeg library, but actually version 1.3 which wont work with Pillow.

Installing Pillow 2.4 (pip install -I pillow) simply results in "OPENJPEG (JPEG2000) support not available".

Thus, it is needed to compile the openjpeg library 2.0 from source. For this, first lets download the openjpeg 2.0.1:http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/openjpeg.mirror/2.0.1/openjpeg-2.0.1.tar.gz 

tar xzvf openjpeg-2.0.1.tar.gz 
cd openjpeg-2.0.1/ 
cmake . 
make 
sudo make install

Please note that we install version of openjpeg 2.0, rather than newer 2.1. Pillow wont recognize openjpeg 2.1 either.

Assuming everything went fine, we can reinstall Pillow:pip install -I pillow
If openjpeg 2.0.1 was detected successfully, we should get the following info "OPENJPEG (JPEG2000) support available" among others. 

NOTE: to install cmake, cmake-2.8.10.2.tar.gz

wget http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html